The so-called “data deluge” shows no signs of abating anytime soon. Facebook, for example, has more than 2.5 billion pieces of content and ingests more than 500 terabytes of new content daily.  Mobile devices are driving this growth of data.  The global proliferation of devices estimated to reach 10 billion by 2017—or 1.4 times the number of people on the planet. As a result mobile-data traffic is exploding. The recently released Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) predicts that global mobile-data traffic will increase 13-fold from 2012 to 2017, reaching 11.2 exabytes per month.

But along with the challenges inherent to this tsunami of data, opportunities abound for monetizing and optimizing information. All of those new mobile consumers—in developed and emerging markets alike—will demand enhanced Connected Life experiences that will be newer, better, and more personalized. Data is the “new oil” that will fuel this opportunity. Networks and the Internet have a critical role to play in the future of Big Data. First, they are the collectors and disseminators of data, gathering it from the millions of Internet-enabled devices, applications, and sensors, then storing it in the right place for analysis and further action. Second, they are creators of critical information on location, presence, device type, application, and more. Read More »

Tags: Big Data, Cisco, cloud, data in motion, mobile world congress, mobility, Personalization, service providers, targeted advertising, virtualization, visual networking index, wi-fi

Mobile carriers face no shortage of pain points as new data streams create unprecedented and staggering amounts of information. But it is important to remember that pain points often arrive in tandem with new opportunities.

From my perspective, observing the driving forces shaping the mobile industry, five key trends stand out. All are laced with challenges and opportunities. And each represents a core element in an interconnected system that is pushing the entire marketplace forward, while demanding innovative breakthroughs in monetizing and optimizing data.

On February 25-28, I will be attending Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona. This year’s event is expected to be the largest ever, with 1,500 exhibitors. I expect these five trends will be major sources of discussion:

1. Video. We are already seeing the true inflection point in video where it becomes mainstream on multiple devices. The mobile and nomadic consumption of video—whether served by mobile carriers or localized Wi-Fi—is popular, commonplace, and growing rapidly. But video will completely reshape the demand side of the industry, creating enormous amounts of data. It threatens to load and clog networks, and it will demand new models for monetization.
2. Accelerating connections. As the Read More »

Tags: Big Data, Cisco, Connected Life, data, data in motion, IBSG, Internet of Everything, IoE, mobile carriers, mobile devices, mobile world congress, multiscreen, offloading, Personalization, service providers, targeted ads, video, wi-fi

Cisco validates new performance benchmarks: linear scale-out to 250K transactions-per-second with 75M concurrent sessions

Earlier this week Cisco introduced a number of new mobile internet innovations to help service providers deliver new and more personalized connected experiences. The mobile Internet is predicted to grow 13-fold between 2012 and 2017 with the addition of billions of connections between people, devices and objects. It is essential that service providers monetize these connections more effectively. To that end, Cisco unveiled a closed-loop strategy to show operators how to leverage their network as a business model enabler.

The first step in the strategy is to help operators unlock the data in their network – their entire portfolio of network infrastructure holds valuable information, or “data in motion.” The second step is to take that data in motion, analyze it and correlate it to extract meaning and insight. Once you have all this insight, you’ve got to do something with it. The third step in the loop is to link that intelligence to policy and business rules which can program the network to do what operators want it to do: deliver value through personalized connected experiences.

An exciting part of this strategy is Cisco® Quantum™, the result of more than $1.5 billion in recent acquisitions and in-house innovation. Cisco Quantum delivers unparalleled mobile network intelligence and programmability to service providers through a suite of software solutions. One of these solutions, the Cisco® Quantum™ Policy Suite, is of particular note because it recently set new industry benchmarks for scale and performance as validated by independent test agency lab EANTC (European Advanced Networking Test Center). Read More »

Tags: cisco quantum, EANTC, mobile, mobility, Service Provider, software, Test results

As shown in the most recent Cisco Visual Networking Index, Japan is one of the fastest growing countries when it comes to mobile data traffic.

Like many service providers, SoftBank, one of Japan’s leading mobile operators, has wrestled with how to manage this vast amount of traffic in an efficient and effective manner.

To address the challenge, SoftBank recently Read More »

Tags: asr, backhaul, metrocell, mobile, mobility, Service Provider, small cell, Softbank

By Jeff Seebeck, VP/GM, Video Control Plane Business Unit,Cisco

…Cisco! As you can imagine, this super-charged our annual trek to Las Vegas for the International CES show, which serves as host for the fanciest-ever black tie event for tech people. (It even had a tech host – David Pogue, himself an  Emmy award winning tech columnist for the New York Times.  Cool.)

This year marked the 64^th time the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ put on its annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards, and on the evening of January 10^th, I was glad to be amongst my friends and colleagues to accept two, count’em two, Emmys. Read More »

Tags: cable, dvr, emmy, Service Provider, technical and engineering emmy, tv, video, videoscape