Altobridge is planning third-quarter trials and fourth-quarter availability for its Data-at-the-Edge platform, being pitched as a solution to handle the growing impact of audio and video transmissions on mobile networks via a reduction in data backhaul congestion of more than 50 percent.
The Irish firm is aiming its platform toward operators with backhaul-constrained base stations, enabling them to extend their investment in existing backhaul infrastructure, whether including microwave and copper-based cellsite links, Ian Walter, the company's vice president of technology, told FierceBroadbandWireless.
Walter, who was touting Data-at-the-Edge in the Irish Pavilion at last week's CTIA Wireless 2012 event, said the third-quarter testing will occur with operators in Africa and Asia. Pending success in those tests, Altobridge expects general availability for the platform before year's end.
Though the company is initially targeting this product to developing countries in order to connect the unconnected, Data-at-the-Edge could have numerous applications in developed markets with remote locations where backhaul is an issue.
Data-at-the-Edge operates within the encrypted cellular transport network to manage and optimize data passing between an operator's core network and its radio access network (RAN). The platform "can detect and remove redundant transmissions, providing maximum efficacy for high-growth video and audio streaming and download traffic," said Altobridge, adding that its platform enables up to a 20 times reduction in load for video and audio traffic.
Altobridge claims its technology leverages "packet handling techniques that can only be applied deep within the access network." Optimization techniques include byte-level caching, predictive cache loading, data stream de-duplication, data compression and protocol optimization. The Data-at-the-Edge platform's centralized caching intelligence and coordinated pre-caching enables a particularly high hit rate, said the company.
The platform aims to avoid potential legal and technical pitfalls found in some Web caching solutions "by employing bit-stream re-transmission elimination technology in a content-agnostic, file-blind configuration," said Altobridge.
On April 2, Altobridge announced it had acquired--in an exclusive deal with Replify--worldwide, mobile backhaul rights to an intellectual property suite comprising proprietary data optimization capabilities that Altobridge is now embedding into the patent-pending Data-at-the-Edge platform.
"Remote communities, remote enterprises or indeed any base station location where a network operator needs to cut backhaul costs, can now benefit from a level of backhaul savings never anticipated within the industry. While cost reduction was the key driver, we have also paid very close attention to achieving the highest quality of service levels and end-user experience," said Altobridge CEO Mike Fitzgerald when announcing the Replify deal.
Altobridge's other products include the Altobridge lite-site, which requires only 4 kbps of bandwidth per active voice call, and Local Connectivity, which switches local calls at the remote site base station to completely eliminate the backhaul need for local calls. Investors in Altobridge include Intel Capital, the World Bank Group's International Finance unit and Enterprise Ireland.
For more:
- see this Altobridge release
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