Commenting on a recent report from Informa indicating a tenfold increase in mobile data consumption, Napatech stated that this will drive renewed interest in improving insight into telecom network performance and optimization.

The recently released “Mobile Content and Applications Forecasts report” from Informa Telecoms and Media predicts that in 2016, mobile phone users will, on average, consume 6.5 times as much video, 8 times as much music and nearly 10 times as much games as in 2011.

This growth in consumption is normally welcomed, but Informa go on to report that the increase in data traffic will far outstrip revenue growth. Global mobile data traffic is forecast to grow tenfold from 3.89 trillion megabytes in 2011 to 39.75 trillion megabytes in 2016. However, global mobile data revenues are only forecast to double in the same period from $325.8 billion in 2011 to $627.5 billion in 2016.

“Tenfold data consumption, but only double revenues, means that carriers need to manage their networks very carefully,” stated Henrik Brill Jensen, CEO, Napatech. “Understanding what services are being used, when and where they are being used and how this impacts your network design is critical to ensuring that mobile networks can accommodate the forecast growth in a cost-effective manner. Network performance monitoring, real-time protocol analysis and network optimization solutions, such as policy enforcement, are all important tools in providing this insight and having the ability to act upon this information.”

In previous research, Napatech has outlined how mobile carriers can use Deep Packet Inspection and Policy Enforcement to provide optimized services.

“Tenfold increases in the amount of data also means increases in data rates”, added Jensen.“So, not only do you need to handle more, but you also have to do it faster. Managing networks at high speed requires real-time analytical solutions that are capable of keeping up and scaling to meet future demands.”

Napatech is the largest vendor of intelligent adapters for network analysis, which are used by Napatech OEM vendor customers to build high performance, high-speed network monitoring, analysis, test, security and optimization systems based on standard off-the-shelf server hardware. Napatech adapters provide unique Deep Packet Capture (DPC) capabilities at speeds up to 40 Gbps. Unlike standard network interfaces, Napatech network adapters provide zero packet loss with built in frame processing, flow identification and distribution to up to 64 server CPU cores. This allows OEM vendors to take full advantage of the latest advances in server technology, such as the recently announced Sandy Bridge server CPUs from Intel.

As a vendor to several of the largest system manufacturers in the world, Napatech is seeing firsthand the interest in increasing data processing capacity and throughput.

“We have many customers at 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps speeds with the transition to 40 Gbps now beginning”, stated Jensen. “By offering a common feature set across all these speed grades through a single API, we allow our OEM vendor customers to easily upgrade from one speed grade to the next as data speeds increase. Supporting intelligent flow distribution to 64 CPU cores allows our customers to scale performance as processing demands increase. It is the combination of scalability on both a network speed and processing level that makes our solution so attractive to our customers.”

By ensuring scalability in both speed and processing, OEM vendors can ensure that solutions can be provided today to address network insight and management issues that can also scale with the forecast tenfold increase in data without a tenfold increase in cost.

For more information please contact Napatech at http://www.napatech.com/.

Visit Napatech at the upcoming Cisco Live event in San Diego from the 11^th to the 14^th of June or at the Interop Tokyo event from the 13^th to the 15^th of June.