A few weeks ago Facebook and Skype announced a partnership to offer free video calling to Facebook users.  These two tech heavyweights, Skype with over 600 million active users, and Facebook with over 750 million, have the potential to make a significant impact, not only in the way people communicate, but also in the Internet consumption habits of users.

The killer application in this partnership is the ease of use.  With this implementation, neither the originating nor the receiving party need to have created a Skype account in order to make a video call, since a button will be installed on every user’s Facebook profile. With Facebook claiming that the average user has over 130 friends, and that half of users access Facebook each day, it is easy to see how this new feature could explode in popularity.

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When Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, was asked in April, what markets he sees are attractive for his company, he responded “All the markets where people have broadband and like TV”.  After initially launching streaming services in the US, and expanding to Canada last fall, Netflix has long been rumored to further expand their service in to either Europe or South and Central America.

Last week, Netflix confirmed those rumours by announcing that in the fall they will begin offering their service to an additional 43 countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. The announcement was short on specifics (no pricing details, no country list, no timeline), but Netflix did say that they will be using a content strategy similar to what they employed in their first international expansion to Canada by offering region-specific content in Spanish, Portuguese, and English.

As Sandvine reported this past April in our Global Internet Phenomena Spotlight: Netflix Rising, only four months after Netflix’s launch in Canada, Netflix had already gained 800,000 subscribers for their streaming service, which by early March accounted for 13.5% of Canada’s peak period downstream traffic.

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Sandvine returned to CommunicAsia as part of the Canadian Pavilion this year.  CommunicAsia is one of the largest information and communication technology (ICT) events in Asia, and takes place annually.  CommunicAsia was co-located with Enterprise IT.

The numbers are in, and all told, the combined events brought in more than 56,000 industry visitors, conference speakers, delegates, exhibitors and media.  Total attendance increased slightly year over year, proving that, in a period of frequent tradeshow consolidation, this event has staying power.

I presented during the CommunicAsia Summit, Next Generation Mobile Broadband Track, along with other industry contributors, as part of a session that tackled the over-arching theme of balancing demand with quality of experience (QoE).  Speakers covered issues such as scaling infrastructure to meet the increasing demand for high-speed data; how to effectively manage networks, and the resulting customer experience; the impact of video on 4G networks; and network policy control techniques to provide visibility into usage and enable tiered service plans.

The latter point speaks to my session where I set the stage by describing the current service provider landscape in which the competing challenges of leveraging capital infrastructure investment and finite network capacity, while attracting customers with differentiated services, are faced.

As Internet traffic profiles rapidly evolve and mobile data (like fixed) drive towards real-time ‘enjoy now’ entertainment, and away from traditional “enjoy later” applications, subscriber QoE demands skyrocket and these interactive, high-value communications must be protected.

I discussed network policy control techniques, treating the network of convergent conditions as a statistical process, and advising that implementation of network policy control solutions take place in a step-by-step framework:

• Planning (identifying how subscriber experience and policies will be base-lined and measured)
• Implementing (network policy control)
• Checking (comparing measurements to baselines and tweaking policies)
• Acting to deploy network-wide.

The theme can be summarized as “you can’t control what you can’t measure”.

I hoped to leave the audience with the message that a purpose-built network strategy is achievable as network technologies transition and subscriber behaviours evolve, through the network-wide visibility and astute decision-making made possible with network policy control (application-, device, subscriber-aware).

Another prevalent focus, both off (summit) and on the exhibit floor was cloud computing.  Mobile VAS Strategy, Satellite Communications, and Convergence were more topics highlighted in the conference program.

In addition to forward-looking discussions from the panel session floor, some notable launches were announced from the exhibit floor. The biggest buzz surrounded the Blackberry booth, where the PlayBook tablet in Singapore was unveiled, and the soon-to-be-released Bold Touch 9900 smartphone was announced; Huawei’s launch of the MediaPad, and smartphone launches by Nokia and Sony Ericsson.

The future of CommunicAsia at the swanky, new venue of Marina Bay Sands is bright and we look forward to another strong showing in 2012.