Ericsson and Akamai announce strategic alliance for mobile cloud solutions

(Feb 15 2011) 4G , Mobile Internet

1. By Phil Marshall PhD, Tolaga Research

    

   On February 14, 2011 Ericsson and Akamai Technologies announced a strategic alliance to create enhanced mobile cloud solutions with the aim of improving the performance and reliability of mobile broadband services. The two companies will leverage their respective strengths, with Ericsson having market dominance in mobile broadband networks, and Akamai being a leading content distribution network (CDN) provider. Through this strategic alliance, Ericsson and Akamai are developing solutions for mobile service providers to cache popular media and content within their mobile networks and closer to the end users. This caching will enable mobile service providers to accelerate mobile broadband service delivery and improve the overall user experience. Ericsson and Akamai have trialed their solution with strategic partners and plan a broader market launch within six months.

    

   The integration of CDN solutions with mobile broadband service delivery, represents an important shift from connectivity centric architectures, which are essentially optimized for voice telephony, to those that are optimized for media distribution. Content caching in the mobile network is a step in the right direction. However, we believe that the increased use of WiFi and femto-cell offload and the proliferation of smartphone devices will drive the future need for content caching in local area network nodes and mobile devices. This will culminate in personal clouds that will benefit from the increasing processing power and storage capabilities of mobile devices, and the intelligent integration of network and service attributes across the entire mobile broadband ecosystem. Companies like Sandisk and Toshiba have already commercialized microSD cards for mobile devices, with up to 32Gbytes of storage, which in some cases incorporate full web server and basic service discovery capabilities. The storage capacity of microSDs is increasing at an alarming rate, with the current standards allowing for theoretical capacities of up to 2Tbytes.

    

   Caching in mobile devices is not a new concept, and is widely used for App store applications delivered by “over-the-top” players. We believe that mobile service providers are uniquely positioned to integrate device caching capabilities with subscriber, service and network intelligence, to significantly improve the overall user experience. To fully leverage these capabilities, a variety of technical and commercial innovations are required. Examples include:

   
   

   • Robust solutions to secure content, such as advanced policy management and enforcement regimes; and content security such as digital rights management (DRM).
   • Advanced algorithms for scheduling and coordinating device caching mechanisms. These algorithms will leverage knowhow from traditional content distribution networks (CDNs) and require solutions to manage the lifecycle of content across the entire hierarchy in which the content and media will ultimately be cached. 
   • Advanced service discovery capabilities. As an increased proportion of web services are delivered to mobile devices, traditional web based search capabilities will be superseded with service discovery, to incorporate intelligent and personalized service filtering and management functionality.

   While Ericsson and Akamai bring many of the key assets for mobile cloud solutions, we believe the success of this initiative will ultimately depend on several philosophical changes on the part of both companies; most notably to embrace the active role of local area networks and mobile devices in future mobile cloud solutions.

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