ERICSSON AND AKAMAI ACCELERATE TELKOMSEL’S MOBILE CONTENT DELIVERY

The strategic alliance between Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) and Akamai, announced at last year’s Mobile World Congress, has borne fruit in the form of Mobile Cloud Accelerator (MCA), which significantly reduces the time it takes for web pages to load on mobile devices.

Indonesia’s Telkomsel is now experiencing MCA for selected users, marking the first time the service has been deployed in a live operator’s network. Using MCA, page load times have been reduced by as much as 70 percent – thereby providing a better and more consistent user experience.

MCA provides operators with a means of monetizing over-the-top (OTT) traffic, and content providers with a way of improving quality of experience, conversion rates and brand perception. Content providers, including Thomson Reuters, have shown great interest in MCA since quality of experience is a decisive factor for their businesses.

Mobile penetration in Indonesia has increased rapidly in recent years. Telkomsel as the largest mobile operator has recorded more than 107 million customers. For many Indonesians, the mobile phone is now the primary means of connecting to the internet– and hence for operators and content providers – page load times are crucial.

A delay in page load time leads directly to a decrease in conversions, fewer page views and a decrease in customer satisfaction. Mobile phone users are unlikely to return to a website that they experience problems accessing, and even more unlikely to recommend the site to others, making the quality of mobile content delivery business critical to content providers.

Bob Schukai, Global Head of Mobile Technology at Thomson Reuters, says: “Our professional customers are increasingly using their mobile devices to access business critical information. Ensuring that we deliver that information with low latency and with a high degree of mobile performance is a key part of the end customer experience. This is why we are excited about the performance improvements we see from MCA.”

Sarwoto Atmosutarno, President Director of Telkomsel, says: “Priority capacity, which ensures a high quality of experience for our end users, is a valuable asset for us. It increases our ability to monetize over-the-top traffic, keeping our customers happy, and helps us to further differentiate ourselves from the competition in Mobile Broadband business.”

Sam Saba, President of Ericsson Indonesia, says: “The Mobile Cloud Accelerator is a unique solution addressing end-to-end quality of experience for mobile content delivery across the internet and mobile networks. We’re pleased to work with Telkomsel, the first operator to deploy MCA, and we are now continuing roll-out of the service.”

MCA is a game changer for the industry as it addresses two performance bottlenecks - the middle-mile internet bottleneck and the last-mile mobile network bottleneck. This is achieved by accelerating content delivery across the internet and prioritizing premium content across the mobile network.

Ericsson will demonstrate MCA at this year’s Mobile World Congress, including the operator portal, which allows operators to monitor the effect of prioritization on user experience and hence the value of premium connectivity.