Audio and video mobile broadband traffic has doubled within the past year, but along with this growth, there has also been a steady increase in end-to-end encryption of data traffic as more content providers endeavour to deliver quality service and enforce various means to protect their content from threats such as Internet spying.
Market research firm, ABI Research, however, found encryption to eliminate nearly 60% of the video and audio optimization market in 2015 as service providers and vendors can no longer use existing optimization methods on encrypted data traffic.
Apart from lacking the right tools, telecom operators and vendors are also challenged by the increased use of difficult-to-manage protocols such as UDP, and inflexible data services.
As a result, telecom operators and vendors need to relook at their strategies to manage the ever increasing traffic on today's network, especially with the expected continuous growth in mobile streaming media entertainment, said ABI Research. Leading infrastructure vendors, for instance Ericsson, Huawei, and Nokia, all have traffic management solutions to keep network operations steady and at the same time, next-generation solutions that perform with encrypted streaming media have started to debut in the marketplace.
