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Posts Tagged ‘3g’

Skyfire gets $10M to take mobile data compression global

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Entrepreneurship, Gerbsman Partners, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on October 11, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Article from GigaOm.

Skyfire, which is trying to help carriers tame their runaway mobile data growth, has raised $10 million as it looks to take its data compression service global. The new money, which comes just nine months after raising $8 million from Verizon Ventures , brings Skyfire’s total funding to $41 million and will help Skyfire expand its footprint in Europe and Asia.

New investor Panorama Capital is leading the round with participation from existing investors Verizon Ventures, Matrix Partners, Trinity Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Skyfire’s Rocket Optimizer provides carriers with a network optimization platform that can produce 60 percent average data savings for videos and 50 percent for images. The company has been deploying Optimizer on the east coast with a Tier 1 carrier, providing video optimization for tens of millions of users. Photo and other multimedia optimization is expected to be added next year, Skyfire CEO Jeff Glueck told me earlier this month.

Glueck didn’t say which US carrier is using Skyfire but it’s a good bet that it’s Verizon. He did say that the US carrier will be rolling out Optimizer across its network early next year.

The big opportunity now is to take the product that’s been tested in the US to carriers in Europe and Asia. The company plans on using its new funding to build up its presence in Eastern Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia and Australia and add to its London and Silicon Valley offices. Glueck told me recently that Skyfire works for both 3G and LTE networks and is in trials with six or seven carriers. And in a statement, he said the issue is even more pressing for European carriers, who are seeing 85 percent of their LTE network bandwidth being used up by video.

“Data deluge is crushing mobile operators, straining the user experience, and squeezing operating margins,” said Glueck in a statement. “Our new funding lets Skyfiretake our proven technology in North America to new regions on a global scale.”

Read more here.

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Meet the New Mobile Network: It’s a Cloud

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , on February 7, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from GigaOm.

“The crush of smartphones, tablets and laptops all vying for ever more bandwidth intense content, has forced mobile operators to beef up their backhaul, rally for more spectrum and implement new network technologies. It’s also reshaping the way they think and build out their networks. Or it will. Last week, I had outlined the the demand for data combined with more people wanting access to the mobile web are forcing operators to add more diverse network technologies, such as Wi-Fi, picocells and femtocells and of course more base stations, which are all of their effort to build more creative pricing plans.

Essentially the current networks and airwaves are unable to meet the demands of millions of consumers trying to download YouTube ( s goog) videos and Posting pictures to their Facebook profiles. Carriers have already embraced Wi-Fi offload but the thought is even that won’t be enough. Plus adding Wi-Fi, and even smaller base stations such as pico cells or even femtocells adds complexity to the network.

As I said in my previous article: “But multiple networks and more base stations, as well as more demand, are forcing operators to undergo a shift similar to what the data center saw as the demand for computing began to overwhelm the profits and abilities of systems administrators to handle it. For example, when it took one person to manage 10 servers, owning 500 was an investment, but now with corporations owning tens of thousands, such a ratio would constrain demand. So places that required a lot of computing adapted and came up with new architectures and software that helped become the redundant, autonomic and cloud-based computing centers familiar today.That same shift will have to happen in the mobile networks, and Intucell is just one company that will help make this shift a reality.”

My previous article focused on Intucell, a startup that’s pushing a technology to help operators reconfigure their networks in real time. There are other startups aiming to address this space, whether it’s with an all-in-one chip design that can work on multiple radio frequencies inside a base station or companies trying to deliver real-time pricing and billing information to operators. But the big gear makers aren’t oblivious to this trend, and today Alcatel-Lucent announced its lightRadio suite of products that answers many of the needs mobile operators have.

With this launch, Alcatel-Lucent has fundamentally rethought the way cellular networks are built. Instead of the traditional model of multiple radios and antennas cluttering up a large cellular tower with cabinets of electronics connected back to the web via a fiber or hardwired backhaul pipe, it has built smaller antennas attached to a single radio that can send and receive Wireless signals using multiple radio technologies including 4G 3G and some 2G technologies. These are then connected back to the network via microwave backhaul and the processing required to separate and route signals occurs deeper inside the network rather than at the base station.”

Read the whole article here.

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