Bandwidth Does Not Solve All Problems, Allot Study Finds

Bandwidth does not solve all problems, particularly video experience on mobile networks, according to Allot Communications. “Traditionally stalling issues were treated by increasing the bandwidth (kbps) allotted for the video transaction,” Allot says. “However, as networks get more congested and video content becomes more prevalent, it is harder to prevent the conditions that cause stalling.”

Skeptics might say those findings are not surprising, given their discovery by a firm that makes its living providing analytics and deep packet inspection services.

But others might say such evidence is why “packet discrimination” that favors video or voice bits at times of network congestion can improve end user experience.

The findings are consistent with past research suggesting that “best effort only” Internet access can, during times of congestion, impair end user application experience.

On the other hand, pre-processing is among the techniques that seems to improve experience. “Videos utilizing 3GP containers were watched for longer duration and had less stalling on average,” Allot says. “This suggests that video content that is formatted in advance for mobile networks improves the quality of experience and is more suitable for mobile and wireless environments.”

One might note, parenthetically, that content delivery networks are among the tools video app providers routinely use to improve experience, precisely the tool many argue should be prohibited in the access portions of networks.

Videos in MP4 containers were watched for shorter durations and had more stalls, Allot notes. “This suggests that such video content is not optimal for the mobile and wireless environment

and is likely to strain network resources and degrade the quality of the video experience.”

On average, the video viewers in the Allot study experienced 6.51 seconds of video stalls. Some 67 percent of all video transactions ended with essentially no stalling.

But 33 percent of the video transactions had at least one second of stalling or more. Some 11 percent of all video transactions experienced from one second to three seconds of stalling.

About 13 percent of sessions experienced three seconds to 10 seconds of stalling, while nine percent of all video transactions had more than 10 seconds of stalling.

Allot also found that bandwidth allocation is not necessarily content-aware which results in insufficient allocation at times or excessive allocation at others.