Royal Weddings, Cup Finals & Your Mobile

MLL Telecom - 9 May 2011

The Royal Wedding in April broke the online streaming records - beating both President Obama's Inauguration and the 2010 World Cup, with an estimated 400 million viewers on YouTube alone. The surge in the use of Flash Mobile RTMP live streaming protocol whilst the wedding was on suggests that a significant number of people watched the wedding on their Smartphone.

The mobile network operators are already under pressure to deal with an increasing demand for capacity from their customers. Live streaming of an event not only uses a lot of bandwidth, it is also extremely time sensitive - imagine if you missed your team's winning goal in the upcoming Champion's League Final because your connection was buffering. With recent reports predicting that Smartphone usage is going to increase 46 fold by 2015, how are the mobile operators maintaining quality of service on live streaming?

Optimising the throughput on the network is one way of ensuring bandwidth capacity - without the high-cost of upgrading links. Caching doesn't work when the events are happening in real time and mobile web traffic cannot be compressed any more than it already has been. One solution mobile operators are implementing is to optimise the RAN using technologies that are able to optimise live web traffic. See the below diagram to see how this works.

By incorporating new technologies like this mobile operators are ensuring that their customer's experiences aren't deteriorated, whilst making the most of the existing infrastructure. Of course, the need to upgrade the network capacity is not negated by RAN Optimisation - eventually, if predictions are to be believed, the backhaul and core network will need to be upgraded.

With RAN Optimisation though live streaming on your mobile is going to be perfectly possible for quite a while yet, so settle down and get ready for Barcelona vs. Man U on 28th May.

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