Content providers will have to start footing the bill and optimising the experience for smartphone users, as mobile networks around the world burst at the seams with congestion, according to content distribution firm Akamai.
The vice president of its mobile business, Pedro Santos, said content companies – not just telecom operators rolling out new networks – will have to make mobile websites load faster on the small screen, if they are to earn valuable dollars from users on the move.
“There will be a shift in thinking at content providers. They are losing customers over mobile if they don’t optimise their content delivery,” he told Techgoondu in an interview earlier this month.
A combination of compression technology and caching can help alleviate some of the network jam that mobile users are facing everywhere, according to Akamai, which has made a business out of optimising websites for the wired Internet.
It believes that increasingly, banks, online shops and other businesses that have users transacting on the go will be keen to use its technology to make the experience smoother.
These content providers who make money out of each transaction would pay more to ensure a smooth experience for users, unlike say, a video site that does not care as much about delivery of its content to phones, said Santos, who was in Singapore to meet customers.
“The economics are different for video versus banking transactions… the banking guys are more willing to spend to optimise (the mobile experience),” he argued.
According to Akamai, a typical desktop website takes an average of three seconds to load, while a mobile website takes a good nine seconds to load on a mobile phone.
The company is offering ways to cache content at mobile gateways, in the same way it helps companies cache their Internet content around the world for quick access by users everywhere.
Millions of hits can saturate and bring down a server, say, when Apple launches a new phone and people rush to catch a glimpse. What Akamai offers brands like Apple is a way to distribute and cache this content on local servers.
For example, the first person in Singapore who watches a new Apple video will access it from the United States, but subsequent users who fire up the video will grab the cached version stored in servers in Singapore. This model of content delivery networks (CDNs) has made live videos such as U2’s concert in 2009 viewable by users everywhere.
Akamai’s Santos said content owners now are looking to a similar model to distribute content to mobile users. At the same time, images and videos – the main items clogging up mobile networks – can be detected early and compressed before they are sent over the air to users, he added.
Telecom operators will welcome the idea. For so long, they have been paying the bill for more expensive and newer networks, which get saturated soon after they are launched. Then consumers get angry when they cannot watch the latest movie trailers smoothly on the phone.
“Devices have been deployed to consumers much faster than the infrastructure,” said Santos. “But mobile networks will start to catch up over time and the experience will improve when content providers start optimising for mobile.”
