MCI EXECUTIVE INTERVIEW
This could have an application
in tiered pricing strategies. Opera- tors are looking at such options in a bid to better balance the cost of provisioning mobile data services with the limited revenue stream that they currently generate because of the flat rate tariffs that were used to stimulate the market in the first place. Being able to dynamically alter data reduction and therefore speed of delivery depending on network load could be a useful tool to op- erators looking to charge premium prices for higher quality of service, Polychronopoulos says. If it is possible to reduce video traf-
fic in such a way that data loads are halved but the end user experience does not suffer proportionally, the question arises as to why operators would not simply reduce everything, whether the network was busy or not. Polychronopoulos argues that in quiet times there are no savings to be made by reducing the size of content being transported. “The operator has already provi-
sioned the network one way or an- other,” he says, “so there is a certain amount of bandwidth and a certain amount of backhaul capacity. When the network is not congested, the transport cost is already sunk. When it becomes congested, though, you get dropped calls and buffering and stalled videos and the user experience suffers. That’s where optimisation shines. Alternatively, media optimi- sation can be factored in during top- level network provisioning when the savings in CAPEX can be extremely compelling.” While LTE is held up by some within
the industry as the panacea to growing demand for more mobile broadband service, Polychronopoulos is uncon- vinced. If anything, he says, the arrival
career history
Dr. Constantine Polychronopoulos’ founded Bytemobile in 2000 to pursue a vision of the mobile internet. As a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UIUC since 1986 and director of the Center for Supercomputing Research and Development since 1995, Dr. Polychronopoulos led research efforts that have had a profound impact on both academic and commercial computing. He holds ten US and international patents and has published a book and over 150 papers in research journals and conference proceedings. Over his 25-year career, Dr. Polychronopoulos has consulted extensively for Fortune 100 companies, served on national and international panels and evaluation boards, and been editor of various ACM and IEEE journals. He received the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1989, the 1998 Bodossaki Foundation Award in Engineering and a Fulbright Scholarship. In 1999, he was recognised as Pascal Professor by Leiden University. Dr. Polychronopoulos holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, an M.S. from Vanderbilt University and a B.S. from the National University of Athens.
“We’re reaching the limits of spec-
tral efficiency,” he says. “Shannon’s Law defines the limit as six bits per Hertz, and while we may be moving to higher-bandwidth wireless broad- band, spectrum remains finite. To offer 160Mbps, you have to allocate twice the amount of spectrum than in 3G, and it’s a very scarce and very expensive resource.” Operators have been wrong to fo-
of the fourth generation will serve only to exacerbate the situation. “LTE is going to make this problem
far more pronounced, for a number of reasons,” he says. “As soon as you offer improved wireless broadband, you open the door to new applications and services. People are always able to come up with new ways of inundating any resource, including bandwidth. We’re going to see more data-driven applications on mobile than we see on the typical desktop, because the mobile device is always with you.” And while LTE promises greater spectral efficiency than its 3G fore- bears, Polychronopoulos says, the fact that spectrum remains a finite resource will prove ever more problematic as services evolve.
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cus exclusively on standards-based solutions to network optimisation issues, Polychronopoulos says. In restricting themselves to 3GPP-based solutions, he argues that they have missed what he describes as “the internet component of wireless data.” Internet powerhouses like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft (which he dubs ‘the GYM consortium’) have established a model that he says is a great threat to the mobile operator community in that it establishes a direct consumer relationship and disregards the “pipe” (wireless broad- band connection) used to maintain that relationship. “The operators have to accelerate
the way they define their models around wireless data so that they’re not only faster than the GYM con- sortium in terms of enabling popular applications, but smarter and more efficient as well,” he says. Dr. Poly- chronopoulos then makes a popular case for the carriers’ success: “The operators have information about the subscriber that no other entity in the internet environment can have; for example, they know everything the subscriber has done over the lifetime of their subscription and the location of each event. They don’t have to let this data outside of their networks, so they are very well positioned to win the race for the mobile internet.” n
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