With no end in sight to the mobile revolution, service providers are under pressure to continuously build and scale their networks to meet the increasing demand for both capacity and service quality from customers.
Hoping to meet this growing need, F5 Networks announced the expansion of its F5 Synthesis traffic and signaling management framework. According to the company, the updated solutions will help service providers as they continually optimize, secure and monetize their mobile networks.
“S/Gi network simplification, LTE roaming, voice over LTE, security and NFV are very important topics for service providers to look at over the next few years in considering their next-generation mobile network deployments,” said Vic McClelland, managing director of networks, Optus. “We are pleased to see F5 Synthesis addressing important issues within the industry.”
Based on the fact that U.S. mobile data usage doubled in 2013, the time is right for service providers to focus on expansion. U.S. mobile users consumed about 1.2 gigabytes of data per month in 2013, compared with 690 megabytes of data per month in 2012, according to wireless carrier consultant Chetan Sharma in the New York Times.
“As mobile operators continue to deploy LTE (4G) and look further towards 5G networks, scaling and securing the data, signaling and application planes become increasingly important,” said Dimitris Mavrakis, principal analyst, telecoms & media, Informa. “F5 Synthesis binds these three realms to provide an architectural framework to address critical issues for mobile operators.”
The F5 Synthesis architectural framework was developed to improve the security, policy enforcement, local DNS, IPv6 migration and content filtering needs of mobile service providers. According to the company, the updated solutions also make it easier for technology partners to collaborate on joint offerings and interoperability.
“Service providers are going through a fundamental architectural shift to SDN and NFV, which increases the importance of automating the scalability, security, virtualization and programmability of their networks,” said Michael Howard, principal analyst, Infonetics Research. “In our view, F5 is the first in the industry to focus this shift on the mobile broadband segment across the data, signaling and application planes, with the aim of helping providers with flexible scaling and rapid service introductions.”
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker 
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