Mobile Cloud Accelerator delivers impressive results

Measurements from the first live trial of the Ericsson/Akamai Mobile Cloud Accelerator (MCA) service show the benefits that premium connectivity and delivery have on quality of experience and satisfaction among content providers.

The trial, involving several content providers, including Thomson Reuters, in Telkomsel’s network in Indonesia, showed significant performance gains thanks to MCA.

The service, a result of the strategic alliance between Ericsson and Akamai announced at Mobile World Congress 2011, is the first solution to address end-to-end quality of experience from the content server, across the fixed internet and mobile network, to user devices.

Trial results show the system works as intended, with page load times up to 70 percent faster with MCA than without it, delivering an improved and more consistent user experience. Page load failures were also largely avoided with MCA.

Mikael Bäck, Head of Strategy and Portfolio Management at Ericsson’s Business Unit Networks, says the results highlight the potential of the Mobile Cloud Accelerator.

“Fundamentally, this is about quality – quality for content providers and quality for users,” he says. “Quality and user experience are more important than ever in subscriber loyalty. So operators who provide quality content delivery will benefit not just from happy subscribers, but from being to profit from over-the-top content though premium content delivery.

“For example, research has shown that even one bad experience with loading webpages, or an interruption while a task is in progress, can have huge negative consequences on a user’s attitude to that site or service.

“MCA avoids those sorts of problems. It is an end-to-end quality-of-experience service, delivering the best to stakeholders and subscribers alike. The feedback we’ve had from content providers is very positive. It delivers their content the way it is intended to be delivered, regardless of where the user is.

“With huge numbers of new fixed and mobile broadband subscriptions around the world every day as we move towards the Networked Society, we can be sure of one thing: secure, constant and quality connectivity and content delivery will be more important than ever. That’s why we are ready to roll out MCA on a large scale.”

Our Mobile Cloud Accelerator film provides a guide to what the service can do – how it combines Ericsson’s technology leadership with Akamai’s content delivery expertise, and an explanation of how it all works.