Last week cable showed its breadth and strength at SCTE’s Cable-Tec Expo ’11, in a fitting venue at the Georgia World Congress Center, across the street from CNN headquarters, a pioneer of stimulating informational content over cable. The Cable-Tec show floor was full of vendors promoting their products ranging from cable tools, connectors, radio frequency measuring equipment, TV remote controls, video compression technology, to IP infrastructure solutions. 

Kicking off the week was the Capacity Management Symposium, during which speakers from Sandvine, Cisco, ARRIS, SeaChange, and Motorola presented their perspectives on how data’s Compound Annual Growth Rate growth rate of 50% is impacting the capacity planning of cable networks.  During my session, I introduced findings from our recently released Global Internet Phenomena Report which contrasted the usage patterns and regulations in North American and Asian augmentation markets with those of emerging markets, such as Africa.  Tools for measurement of Quality of Experience (QoE) are all the more vital in these times of explosive broadband video growth.

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Here at Sandvine, we are recognized industry leaders.  We’re excited to work in a rapidly-evolving market segment that poses countless complex problems in need of innovative solutions, and we’re proud of our track record for contributing to our industry’s technological advancement and thought leadership.  We are consistently investing in developing leading-edge technology for global ISPs, and we even continued to invest heavily during recent economic downturns, believing that future success is predicated on present investment. We invest more money in R&D than any of our competitors… in fact, we invest more in R&D than our two largest competitors combined!

On the thought leadership front, Sandvine’s Global Internet Phenomena program, reporting on Global Internet usage trends since 2002, is widely regarded as the pre-eminent source of information about fixed and mobile consumer Internet trends. For instance, we have revealed that more than half of all Real-Time Entertainment traffic in the United States is being driven by consumer devices like game consoles and smart TVs, and that the Playstation 3 alone accounts for more than a quarter of Netflix traffic (see the Netflix Rising spotlight).

Back in the early days, we were called heretics for announcing that P2P traffic was the dominant form of traffic on the Internet when everyone otherwise believed it to be email and Web surfing.  Sandvine is used to a bit of controversy and we take it all in stride.  Why?  Because we build on our real-world experiences to design products that bring the highest value to our customers, and we’ll continue to out-innovate our competition. Read the rest of this entry »

I was in South Africa this week, attending AfricaCom 2011 in Cape Town.  The show garnered around 8,000 registrants and generated a lot of foot traffic. The main show buzz focused on the enormous growth potential for Internet connectivity and services in Africa. At the show, GSMA announced: “Africa is now the world’s second largest mobile market by connections after Asia, and the fastest growing mobile market in the world.” 

Similarly, Informa Telecoms & Media stated:  “the broadband experience in Africa is to become increasingly nomadic with the number of broadband connections over cellular networks exceeding 250 million by the end of 2015.”  Their new “Mobilizing Public Services in Africa” white paper, Informa ranks South Africa just ahead of Kenya and Egypt.

Sandvine also had some interesting statistics to share at the show, specifically regarding our research on Internet usage in Africa.  More information can be found in our Global Internet Phenomena Spotlight: Africa, Fixed Access, Fall 2011, but some of our findings revealed trends that are typical of emerging markets: Read the rest of this entry »

In our Global Internet Phenomena Report: Fall 2011 published just last week, we noted the growing popularity of data messaging apps on mobile networks.  In Asia-Pacific specifically we observed that during peak period, between 6%-8% of all mobile subscribers were using the messaging application WhatsApp.  For those who are unfamiliar, WhatsApp is a smartphone app that allows subscribers to use their data plan to send text and picture messages without having to pay any SMS or MMS fees.

BlackBerry users have long praised BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) for its ability to send messages using a data plan to other BlackBerry users, but in recent years as the smartphone marketplace has become more fragmented, messaging apps that allow users to send messages between platforms have really started to gain popularity.  LiveProfile, Kik, PingChat are just a few of the apps available that offer this functionality, but WhatsApp popularity is undeniable – the service is now reporting that their users are sending over 1 billion messages each day.

While subscribers love these apps, network operators are, understandably, less enthusiastic. Apps that enable instant messaging or voice communication via data plans compete directly with the SMS and voice services upon which operators depend for a substantial portion of revenue.

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