Guest blog post by Hussein Maherali, Senior Product Manager, Sandvine

This year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) show in Barcelona, Spain last week did not disappoint.   With over 60,000 attendees, considerable show buzz was generated, with a focus on Wi-Fi, small cell infrastructure strategy, pricing for roaming data, and Customer Experience Management (CEM).

CEM was touted as the most over-used phrase at this year’s show.  While many analysts and journalists used CEM as a means to spark discussion and debate, equally as many vendors and operators showed they were focused on delivering a differentiated customer experience.  Nokia’s CEO, Rajeev Suri was quoted as saying, “Our industry consistently over-promises and under-delivers” and with that, noted he was putting plans in place to reverse this trend.  With this in mind, there’s lots of opportunity for vendors to provide operators with solutions that help analyze and improve subscriber Quality of Experience (QoE).

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A significant trend in the Network Policy Control industry is that network intelligence devices are moving increasingly close to the subscriber access edge.  This trend is true both in fixed access networks, where elements such as our own Policy Traffic Switch are deployed alongside the aggregation devices (BRAS in DSL and CMTS in Cable), and in the mobile space, where devices are moving ever-closer to the base stations (NodeB or eNodeB).

Being at the edge has many benefits, including more efficient and accurate subscriber awareness, measurement, and management of network traffic.  Ultimately, these characteristics mean that Communications Service Providers (CSPs) gain more precise control over network traffic, which lets them manage congestion precisely, charge accurately, and deliver differentiated subscriber services.

Focusing on mobile networks specifically, we’ve invested in the technology to allow our network policy control solutions to be deployed in the packet core network, for instance between the SGSN and GGSN, which yields:

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In the U.S., Sunday’s big game was not only the most watched Super Bowl ever, it was also the most watched television program of all time.

With so many people tuned in to their TVs, we thought it would be fun to take a look at how their behavior may have impacted Internet traffic.  This year’s Super Bowl is particularly interesting to look at from our standpoint, since it was the first time that the game has been allowed to be streamed online (although the streaming was effectively limited to the U.S.).

With such a popular sporting event, and its newfound availability to be streamed, it should come as no surprise that there were noticeable changes in Internet traffic patterns.  When compared to previous Sundays, NBCSports.com streaming saw an exponential increase in traffic.  At 9pm, the Super Bowl stream accounted for 6.2% of downstream network traffic – territory usually reserved for the Internet’s biggest websites.

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Last week, Sandvine provided some facts and figures on the impact the closing of popular storage and back-up service Megaupload had on networks across the globe.

With the media and legal spotlight being shined on this traffic category in recent days, a number of competing sites have either decided to shut themselves down, or dramatically alter the way files are uploaded or downloaded from their servers.

One such service to make such a drastic change was FileSonic, who has halted any new uploads, and is only allowing users to download their personal files. Read the rest of this entry »