Viet Hai will provide operators across Southeast Asia with access to Aircom’s suite of network planning and optimisation solutions. The Vietnamese firm has 15 years’ experience providing engineering and consultancy services to telecom operators, broadcasters and internet service providers.

“Operators in South East Asia are facing the same pressures as those across the globe. They must all optimise and manage their networks to get the most value from existing assets,” says Nguyen Ngoc Toan, Director at Viet Hai.

“As a trusted partner Viet Hai will continue to provide operators in South East Asia with quality, localised support”, says Alwyn Welch, CEO at AIRCOM International.

The platform provides an open framework that gives the operator the flexibility to rapidly develop, and implement, advanced value-added services, and will form the basis of Golan Telecom’s service layer architecture when the company launches consumer services.

Commenting on the announcement, Golan Telecom said: “This solution provides us with the ability to satisfy the constant changes in consumer demand for services and applications, with a significantly reduced total cost base. This open framework allows us to develop services ourselves, or via developer community supported by OpenCloud.”

Jeff Gordon, CEO of OpenCloud, said: “The platform was designed specifically to meet the competitive challenges mobile operators now face. It meets that challenge by exploiting an open standards environment to allow for rapid, user-centric and cost effective service development.”

More info:

• http://www.opencloud.com/
• www.golantelecom.co.il

Multiscreen video, which ranges from Over-the-Top (OTT) video services in the home to streaming video to computers, mobile phones or tablets, is growing at an impressive rate. Nielsen reports that US consumers watching video on the internet and on mobile phones have grown 5% and 41% respectively over the last year.[i] There is no doubt that multiscreen is at the epicenter of a new video revolution.

The rate of growth of video as a portion of total Internet traffic is explosive. It is estimated that 58% percent of total Internet traffic by 2015 will be video streaming.[ii] This growth is not limited to the United States. In fact, over 75% of global consumers watch video content over the Internet via connected devices.[iii] While much of today’s internet video traffic is generated and consumed in mature video markets, the impending growth of Internet video will come from developing regions. When looking at international regions with the largest forecasted growth, the Middle East and Africa region is projected to have the strongest consumer internet video traffic growth with a 105 percent compounded annual growth rate through 2015. Latin America is expected to have the second largest growth rate at 65 percent, followed by Central and Eastern Europe at 63 percent.[iv] These growth rates greatly outpace the global consumer average growth rate of 48 percent, meaning that these regions are the true engines of growth for Internet video.

Improving the Customer Experience for Multiscreen Video

To take advantage of the opportunities of multiscreen video services, providers need to be able to address some significant challenges to customer experience. Customer experience is the essential factor in reducing churn in the multiscreen world. Unlike traditional linear services, multiscreen consumers are not locked into a fixed network; they have the entire internet and an ever-increasing number of video providers. The harsh reality of the multiscreen business model is that when consumers encounter bad experience, they move on to a competitor to get the video they desire. Providers need to implement Video Service Assurance solutions to manage their video services and improve customer experience. To improve customer experience, there are three challenges providers must overcome.

Utilizing Adaptive Bitrate Technologies for Connected Devices

The first main challenge is that multiscreen services utilize adaptive bitrate (ABR) technology to stream video to connected devices. ABR technologies adapt the size, and thus quality, of video streams to the available bandwidth of the internet connection to the connected device. Each video asset is sent through a segment encoder to create different bitrates file chunks for streaming. This way, the chunk with the best bitrate for the available bandwidth is sent to the connected device. Providers must monitor for Quality of Experience (QoE) at the segment encoder to ensure that the video assets have not been corrupted during the encoding process, which could lead to macroblocking or black screens.

Complex Content Delivery Networks

Secondly, delivering multiscreen services requires entirely new network technologies. Multiscreen video is pushed to the internet through Content Delivery Networks (CDN), which introduce many new network components. Most significantly, providers need to monitor the communications between origin servers, which store all video assets, and caching servers, which send video assets to connected devices. QoS metrics designed specifically for ABR, like VeriStream, are essential for ensuring these devices are communicating and delivering video assets properly. Without effectively monitoring these complex networks, providers risk serious quality degradation and a negative impact on customer experience.

Large, Diverse Number of Connected Devices Over an Unmanaged Network

The third main challenge for multiscreen video is the immense number of connected devices receiving and displaying video. This unmanaged network of devices, ranging from computers to connected TV’s, mobile devices and tablets, is incredibly diverse and can cover a very large geographic area. Providers have little control over what kind of device will access their network, from which area of the network the device will be used, and the capabilities of these devices. In order to truly understand end client experience, providers need to monitor QoE and QoS from within the end client devices in real time and aggregate and report on this information from the cloud.

Multiscreen video is positioned firmly in the center of the video everywhere transformation. The ability to watch video on multiple devices, across large geographic areas and from multiple providers is a huge opportunity for the video industry. In the coming years, the most significant growth in this market will come from developing regions, most significantly from the Middle East and Africa, Latin America, and Central and Eastern Europe. These opportunities also present some significant challenges to customer experience. To overcome these challenges, providers must employ cutting edge Video Service Assurance solutions to improve customer experience and assure their revenues.

The five-year managed services contract will allow U Mobile to focus its efforts on product development and at the same time have clearer visibility and more control over capital and operating expense. The operator will also be in a position to offer its customers more innovative services once the transformation is complete.

The convergent charging solution, based on Ericsson's Charging System and BSCS iX, will be deployed and integrated with the operator’s existing infrastructure. Leveraging on the new BSS, U Mobile will expand its services, such as real-time promotions and notifications, product and services cross bundling, real-time cost control for postpaid subscriptions, subscriber personalization and flexible mobile wallets.

Kaizad Heerjee, U Mobile CEO, says: "U Mobile will realize a complete standardization and modernization of billing architecture that will ultimately allow us to offer our subscribers more personalized products and, therefore, a higher quality of user experience."

Janne Laitala, Head of Ericsson Malaysia and Sri Lanka, says: "U Mobile customers should look forward to new and unique offerings, and an even better customer service experience."

In the first ever attempt to comprehensively map the use of Twitter in Africa, Portland Communications and Tweetminster analysed over 11.5 million geo-located Tweets originating on the continent during the last three months of 2011. This pan-African analysis of Twitter traffic was complemented by a survey of 500 of Africa’s most active Tweeters.

How Africa Tweets found:

• South Africa is the continent’s most active country by volume of geo-located Tweets, with over twice as many Tweets (5,030,226 during Q4 2011) as the next most active Kenya (2,476,800). Nigeria (1,646,212), Egypt (1,214,062) and Morocco (745,620) make up the remainder of the top five most active countries.
• 57% of Tweets from Africa are sent from mobile devices.
• 60% of Africa’s most active Tweeters are aged 20-29.
• Twitter in Africa is widely used for social conversation, with 81% of those polled saying that they mainly used it for communicating with friends.
• Twitter is becoming an important source of information in Africa. 68% of those polled said that they use Twitter to monitor news. 22% use it to search for employment opportunities.
• African Twitter users are active across a range of social media, including Facebook, YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn.

Mark Flanagan, Portland’s Partner for Digital Communications, says: “One of the more surprising findings of this research is that more public figures have not joined Africa’s burgeoning Twittersphere. With some notable exceptions, we found that business and political leaders were largely absent from the debates playing out on Twitter across the continent. As Twitter lifts off in Africa, governments, businesses and development agencies can really no longer afford to stay out of a new space where dialogue will increasingly be taking place.”

How Africa Tweets found that Twitter is helping to form new links within Africa. The majority of those surveyed said that at least half of the Twitter accounts they follow are based on the continent.

Beatrice Karanja, Associate Director and head of Portland Nairobi, says: “We saw the pivotal role of Twitter in the events in North Africa last year, but it is clear that Africa’s Twitter revolution is really just beginning. Twitter is helping Africa and Africans to connect in new ways and swap information and views. And for Africa – as for the rest of the world – that can only be good.”