Click-to-cloud services a bandwidth crunch culprit and revenue generator

TORONTO—“Click to cloud” services that automatically send mobile phone photos and other files to cloud services will become “a big bandwidth consumer” that can easily congest mobile networks, Dave Caputo, president and CEO of Sandvine Inc., told The Wire Report in an interview. Otherwise known as a continuous cloud-client connection, click to cloud services automatically transfer photos and other data created on a mobile device to web services like social media or cloud storage sites. “I think it’s going to be a real impact,” Caputo said in an interview at the 2012 Canadian Telecom Summit. “It’s going to be a big bandwidth consumer in the near future and it’s something that no one really appreciates.” The trend also presents revenue opportunities. As mobile consumers start to face congestion and more failed uploads, they could pay a fee or a surcharge for "guaranteed" uploads and access to the cloud. Caputo said click-to-cloud services accounted for one per cent of upstream mobile traffic in North America in the first half of 2012 and that figure will rise as the service becomes more popular, which could cause a spike in upstream traffic demands on mobile networks. “You see these iPhone ads and the iPad ads and you’re taking the picture and it miraculously is there on your television, it’s there on your iPad. That’s all the network doing that,” he said. “On the mobile side, it’s all upstream.” Caputo said “continuous” traffic could cause upstream congestion in mobile networks on a “cell by cell” basis if too many phones are uploading images within a close range. He estimated a burst of six photos taken in two or three seconds would equate to about 30 megabytes of data. Don Bowman, Sandvine’s chief technology officer, said in an interview that upstream traffic is less efficient than downstream traffic over mobile networks, partly due to the difficulty of receiving signals from mobile sources, which are more prone to interference than stationary antennas. “In the downstream direction you could get between three or four bits per hertz, which means that on your 5 MHz down you get between 15 and 20 megabits,” Bowman said. “In the upstream you’d actually be really pressed to get one bit per hertz.” Bowman said some of the most popular services that offer click-to-cloud connectivity include Apple Inc.’s iCloud, Google Inc.’s Google Drive, Microsoft Inc.’s SkyDrive and Dropbox. He said click-to-cloud traffic increased from no mobile bandwidth consumption at Christmas to one per cent of consumption at the end of the first quarter. “It’s actually just nascent,” he said. “We think this is just the start.” Bowman said the increase can be attributed to features like that on the latest Android operating system, Ice Cream Sandwich, which automatically uploads photos captured on mobile phone cameras to users’ Google accounts. As the data crunch becomes more apparent to users, mobile operators can capitalize on upstream network congestion by charging extra for prioritized or guaranteed uploads. “In the upstream direction it could be an opportunity because click-to-cloud services, we think, are eventually going to drive a fairly significant volumes,” Bowman said. “When you talk about things like price certainty, it becomes a way for you to put specific value on that—attach a price and charge the user for it.” Jeffrey Maddox, vice-president of systems engineering for Cisco Systems Inc.’s service provider sales division, said upstream network congestion is most likely to occur during large public events like the Super Bowl or the upcoming London Olympics. “It would be the exact example that I would give, which would be the, ‘Look ma, I’m standing at the Super Bowl, sending a picture, sending a video,’” he said. Maddox said event coordinators can ease the burden by ensuring their events offer public WiFi access. He said handset device manufacturers can also help ease congestion by allowing phones to automatically wait until there’s a WiFi signal or strong upstream connections before sending click-to-cloud data. Most smart phones now have user settings that, if turned on, can prevent the phone from engaging in high-bandwidth activities without a WiFi connection. Nick Adamo, senior vice-president of Cisco’s global service provider market segment, said mobile app-makers can build similar features into click-to-cloud applications to delay uploads, if necessary. He said this would benefit app makers because it would help ensure their apps work as they are designed to. “They understand that they can’t take the network for granted anymore because things are becoming way too congested,” he said of the app maker community. “When we think about all this, it is about how all the pieces have to come together,” he said. Bowman said he believes data usage and mobile cloud connections are becoming the norm. “This isn’t a backup style sync we’re talking about here, this is lifestyle sync,” he said. Bernard Lord, president of the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA), told The Wire Report that Canadian carriers have seen a pending upstream crunch coming for some time. He said an increasing number of devices and applications that communicate with mobile networks to upload data and perform other functions have increased demand on mobile networks at all hours of the day. Even “lull” periods see higher traffic volume, he said. “Some of the carriers have told me that at three o’clock in the morning their networks are operating at 80 per cent capacity,” he said. “That’s because devices are communicating with networks, ongoing, without people even being awake.” nkyonka@thewirereport.ca

Click-to-cloud services a bandwidth crunch culprit and revenue generator

News | June 5, 2012

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