This is the tale of two mobile operators. Both in Europe. Both looking up, but not in awe, at bigger competitors. Both hell-bent on improving upon and competing with quality. Both using a tool from a small company in Naperville, Ill., to help make that happen.
3 UK is a Hutchison company, Hutchison 3G UK Limited to be exact. 3 UK is considered a market leader when it comes to mobile broadband and has taken all the accolades and lumps that come with it. In fact, AT&T has nothing on 3 UK when it comes to the network challenges presented by high volumes of mobile broadband data and smartphones. And like the coverage map competition between AT&T and Verizon here in the U.S., 3 UK is in a spitting contest with Orange over who has the biggest network.
But deep down, even though it has committed to investing heavily in the growth of its network and recently activated its 10,000th 3G site, 3 UK knows that bigger and better are subjective metrics and present an unsolvable argument, whereas the individual customer experience does not. And that’s where it will focus.
Si.mobil is a Mobilkom Austria company. It is the second largest operator in Slovenia with a 28 percent market share and approximately 600,000 subscribers. It also is part of the Vodafone Group, but it is still looking up at Mobitel, which has roughly twice the market share at 57 percent. And — surprise, surprise — it claims to have as good, and in some cases better, coverage than Mobitel.
But large or small, quality is an expectation in Slovenia. As you will see later on, the company has a few metrics that prove it.
But this tale hinges on the technology through which both operators have found important elements of their quality programs. So it is there we will start, since the technology has attracted as much positive and negative attention as mobile broadband itself. That technology is deep packet inspection (DPI).
Oh Wait. No It Isn’t.
Pummeled by press and paranoia, deep packet inspection technology has had to adapt. And indeed it has, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that people have adapted to it. Although calmer heads have prevailed, DPI was the original villain, besides Comcast, in earlier days of the net neutrality debate because of its ability to examine packets for the type of traffic it carried and potentially throttle it.
Truth be told, said Mark McIlvane, president and COO of Velocent Systems, “In our business, we don’t even see any of the content. We don’t have any idea what’s inside and we’re glad, because with all the security problems around the world, you don’t want to be looking at that stuff,”
With that, Velocent says it is out of the DPI business and prefers the term “deep packet capture.”
So what does Velocent look at and why is it different?
