Mobile Internet for the Next Two Billion

Transcription

1 Mobile Internet for the Next Two Billion A whitepaper on using cloud technology to create a virtual smartphone experience for the next two billion internet consumers May

2 Mobile Internet for the Next Two Billion Is it realistic to imagine that millions of people in emerging and developing countries are currently accessing the Internet on their non-smartphones (let s call them feature phones ) with speeds comparable to smartphone users in developed countries? The answer is a resounding yes and it s binu s patented software platform 1 that is making this possible by delivering internet services 10x faster than standard mobile browsers whilst using 10x less mobile data. Our purpose here is to explain how binu manages to achieve this but first let s consider a few facts regarding mobile connectivity in the world today. Phone facts There are approximately 5 billion mobile users 2 in the world today, with 4 billion feature phones and 1 billion smartphones. The number of smartphones is increasing all the time but it s estimated that only 2 in every 5 handsets will be smartphones by the end of The main reason is cost the price of smartphones is coming down but they still cost five to ten times as much as the average feature phone. Furthermore, as smartphone prices come down, so do feature phone prices. Today you can buy a low-end basic Android smartphone for $80 to $100 and you can buy a data capable feature phone for $15 to $20. Within two years prices may well come down to $50 for a smartphone and $10 for a feature phone. Only one third of the world s population (approx. 2.7 billion people) has access to the Internet. Globally there are 4 billion people not yet using the Internet and more than 90% of them are from the developing world 3. Most emerging and developing countries are rapidly becoming mobile-first economies where the primary means of Internet connectivity is via handheld mobile devices using mobile wireless network infrastructure. It s easy to assume that as more people get data capable feature phones or smartphones they ll all be connected to the Internet. But it s not a given. In fact, the majority of them will still not be using the Internet. Over 90% of mobile subscriptions in emerging markets are prepaid, i.e. pay as you go, and paying for mobile data using precious prepaid airtime credit is unpredictable and quickly becomes more expensive than the purchase cost of a phone. For billions of mobile consumers around the world it s not bill shock they re worried about, it s bill fear. 1 binu has three granted patents covering the techniques outlined in this paper: US Patent No: 8,082,327, US Patent No: 8,326,949, US Patent No: 8,533,313 2 Ericsson Mobility Report, June mobility- report- june pdf 3 The International Telecommunication Union, May D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFactsFigures2014- e.pdf Page 1 of 6

3 Mobile network infrastructure is extremely expensive and takes time to rollout whilst at the same time also investing to increase capacity on existing infrastructure to meet rapidly growing demand for data services. In most developing countries poor quality wireless networks (usually 2G) are part of everyday life. For example, national 3G coverage in India today is 9% 4. And in the cities where 3G coverage might be available it s often congested and poor performing, becoming only more so as the number of connected devices proliferate. The feature phones used by 80% of the world s mobile phone users and come with their own set of additional problems. These include endless waiting whilst watching twirling icons on screens due to slow data connections, clunky cursor navigation (as opposed to touch screen), slow switching times between apps as device operating systems not support multitasking, limited memory and storage capacity, and limited services that support the administration of apps. It can also be difficult to access content in local languages with many language scripts not able to be displayed on low-cost phones. What options are there to improve the situation? If the goal is to provide these devices with faster, more efficient access to mobile Internet services what options are available to achieve this? The phones themselves don t provide the answer because the basic connectivity of all these devices has been established using pre-existing Internet standards such as WAP/HTML and/or the data protocols set by wireless standards such as GSM, 2G, 3G, 4G, etc. In addition, market fragmentation with different operating standards across network providers and device manufacturers means any agreement for a pre-installed solution covering all devices is an impossible dream. When all is considered, the only way a device such as a feature phone is going to enjoy more efficient and usable Internet connectivity is via a software solution. And the software would need to be a small enough footprint to enable users to download the app over slow, limited networks onto phones with limited storage capacity. The binu Solution binu has developed a software platform that enables super-fast, data-lite access to the Internet from feature phones and Android smartphones. It can be accessed easily by downloading and installing a lightweight mobile app that works efficiently even on slow 2G networks. 4 GSMA Intelligence Page 2 of 6

4 The binu Virtual Smartphone - how does it work? binu utilizes a combination of techniques (explained in more detail below) but, in a nutshell, it works by creating a virtual smartphone in the cloud for each user, ensuring that all application processing is done on the binu cloud platform, as opposed to on the mobile device, and through an efficient data protocol and data caching delivering all display output to the phone in a highly compressed format that minimizes mobile network bandwidth. Blending the app and the browser There are two standard ways to deliver an application solution to a mobile phone - either as an app or as a website delivered in a browser. Both have their disadvantages. Browsers are slow and inefficient on most low-end phones. They usually don t run JavaScript, which in any case would place processing demands on the phone, and it is difficult to navigate around them with a clunky cursor that has to be moved around the screen by pressing buttons. Apps overcome these limitations but come with their own disadvantages. The app has to be started each time it is used and its functionality is baked-in before download. This is a major issue on feature phones that don t support multi-tasking where it s difficult to update previously installed apps. There s also significant overhead in maintaining function rich apps across multiple devices as extensive testing is required and multiple versions will be active in the field at any point in time. binu has overcome all of these issues with innovative design features designed from the ground-up to optimize the mobile internet user experience with a simple to use interface and super-fast, data efficient response times, even on simple $20 feature phones operating on 2G networks. By executing all application functionality in the cloud rather than on the phone, the app developer is relieved of all the release and update issues that come with traditional apps. To add functionality to an app, or to fix a problem, changes are made to an application server as opposed to millions of phones distributed throughout the world. All user navigation and application processing is managed, logged and monitored on the cloud platform and errors or problems can be identified in real-time. Developers of traditional apps are usually kept in the dark regarding how their app is being used but with binu every navigation click is recorded and available for analysis. Instant feedback and the ability to change functionality on-the-fly lead to significant savings in app management that ultimately means binu solutions are cheaper to build, deploy, maintain and optimize. Keeping the work away from the phones binu overcomes the limited processing power available on most phones by utilising serverside acceleration. Heavy-lifting computation is offloaded to cloud-based servers where computation resources are cheap and abundant. Server efficiency is key to enabling the system to scale economically to millions of users. Page 3 of 6

5 The binu solution does not just move small chunks of processing to cloud servers - it moves the entire application execution. It does this by virtualizing a complete smartphone within the cloud platform giving each user (usually with a feature phone) a window into their own dedicated virtual smartphone. Feature phones have basic central processing units (CPUs). Unlike computers, they do not have optimised math coprocessors that typically are used on PCs for any graphics work. For this reason, binu has gone further than other mobile applications by removing the entire graphical rendering process to the cloud. Here, optimisation servers make every decision about how an individual screen will be rendered, performing graphical processing right down to the drawing of individual text characters. This means that all images are optimised for a device before being delivered over a wireless network. By the time a screen display is sent to a phone it has been converted into a set of small graphical components that only need to be placed at pixel locations defined in the page specification. Rendering a page this way drastically reduces the load on the device s CPU. Some mobile solutions attempt to alleviate the mobile wireless network problem by heavily compressing data before transmission. However, decompression places a heavy demand on a device s processing power and the time saved in transmission is often lost while the data is being decompressed. binu uses a proprietary method to compress mobile data but it uses an approach that requires no additional CPU processing to decompress the data. Working with limited bandwidth The majority of mobile subscribers in the world today still only have access to 2G network coverage and this is not expected to change for some years. Most mobile subscribers in developed countries have forgotten how painfully slow 2G networks are. binu is so efficient in its use of network bandwidth that most users can t tell when they are connected on 2G, 3G or even 4G. This is achieved in a number of ways: Data compression: binu optimises all data before it is sent over the wireless network. By the time a page travels to a phone it has been compressed into a numeric definition of the content. binu does not even rely on sending standard character sets, such as ASCII or UTF8, for rendering by a phone s operating system which means any language script can be displayed on any phone, irrespective of its operating system capability. For example, many binu users in Ethiopia enjoy reading news in Amharic script, which few if any feature phones support. Intelligent caching: binu avoids sending anything twice. Content is cached aggressively (but in a compressed format so that more of it can be stored). Pages are also broken into multiple parts and sent and cached separately. As a result a new page may be defined by a set of page-parts already on the phone so sending a page may only mean transmitting a few characters that are different from parts or text used by previous pages. Page 4 of 6

6 Part pages, pre-fetching and fetch-on-scroll: Because page rendering is managed in the virtual smartphone, binu s servers know how much of a page a user can see before they start scrolling. binu avoids wasting bandwidth by initially only sending the top part of a page that is visible and then send the rest of the page when the user is likely to start scrolling down. Usually a user will navigate away from a page well before they get anywhere near the bottom. The binu system anticipates this and starts to send pages the user is likely to move to before it sends the bottom of the current page. It can afford to send these linked pages because it only needs to send the top of the pages so their size is small. When a user navigates to a new page it is likely that the top of that page is pre-cached (i.e. already sent to the phone) and it will therefore display instantly. Image Optimization: Outside of the binu platform most images sent to phones contain more detail than the phones can actually display. They usually have too many pixels and more colours than the screens can express. binu optimises every image before it sends it to the phone, reducing pixel counts and colour variations to suit the device. On occasions more quality is dropped to give the users on the worst networks even greater speed. Addressing the fragmentation problem One of the main challenges involved in building mobile apps is how to handle the device fragmentation problem. In other words an app needs to work on a multitude of different phones, all of which have significantly different systems, components and features. Firstly, there is the split between Java and Android devices that use totally different technologies to build apps. Then, within each type, there is huge fragmentation with thousands of variations based on screen resolutions, input method (numeric keypads, qwerty keypads, touch screen displays, virtual keyboards), vendors, models, generations, carrier modifications, and network types. There are also the variations depending on which encoding methods are supported (e.g. sound and video encodings), camera capabilities, etc. It is hard to solve all the problems that originate from this fragmentation while trying to conceive and build a great application. A key design goal for binu was to manage this device fragmentation to relieve application developers of the problems they present. The binu solution is so comprehensive that single applications can be developed to run devices even when there are significant differences, i.e. screens that are 100 times bigger than other screens (128x168 pixels to 1920x1080 pixels). The beauty of doing all the processing in the cloud is that any variations that are found to cause problems can be addressed within the virtual smartphone with centralised code changes. So there is no need to release new versions of apps and send them out to all the thousands of users affected (which is almost impossible with feature phones anyway). Any changes made can be tested within the virtual smartphone first and then sent out. Needless to say, doing it this way delivers huge savings in testing. Page 5 of 6

7 What this means is that the differences (the fragmentation) related to all the various devices becomes less of a problem with the binu solution because the variability of the devices can be managed by the platform. A global solution - translations and locations Localising an application for a global user base is a major challenge for application developers. Most users would obviously prefer to view Internet content in their own language but, with all the different languages in the world, is this really feasible? The binu platform has made this possible by supporting all user languages and managing the translation of pages either automatically or manually. There is no coding required to write a page once and deliver it in 40 languages. With different languages come different character systems and not all character sets are supported on all phones. Most feature phones can only render text from two or three languages; other languages require additional fonts and phone users have no way to add the required fonts. With binu they do not need to. binu renders any required characters within the virtual smartphone (where almost all the world s fonts are supported) and then sends their image to the user s screen to be drawn. This means that with binu it is possible to render any language script on any phone. For the app developer this is one less problem to worry about during development and it also means that they don t have to distribute different versions of their apps for different countries to handle their distinct languages. The binu platform automatically locates a user using their IP address and other data and the app can then easily adapt to the country, region or city of the user. Understanding user activity With standard mobile apps it is often a challenge to discover whether an app has been used and, if so, exactly how it was used. With binu this problem is eliminated. Due to binu s client/server architecture it is simple to measure and report exact details of the user s activity. The log files on the application s servers can be analyzed as if they are web log files so the app developer has the same deep analysis of activity that they enjoy with website traffic. However, with binu it is possible to get an even deeper understanding of user behaviour because all the activity in the virtual smartphone is logged and available to the application owner either through summarized reports or as raw data. binu services for applications App developers using the binu platform can take advantage of a number of platform application services that have been developed to enhance their apps or save development time. Account Management: The Account Management Suite provides all the tools required to register and manage user accounts. Users can create accounts, recover and manage passwords, set preferences, etc. Administration access allows the application owner to monitor and suspend accounts, change permissions or award badges. Page 6 of 6

8 Financial Transactions: The Financial Transactions Suite supports account balances, the ability to load their accounts via hundreds of global payment gateways, store purchasing and the ability for users to purchase airtime from hundreds of carriers. Used with the Account Management Suite this financial system can provide a high level of security and includes tools to identify scammers and fraudulent users. Notifications: The Notifications Suite allows the application administrator to create notifications and target them at different users. Notifications may appear as splash screens when the user is using the app or can be pushed to the user via , SMS or Android notifications. Summary In a recent paper 5 Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook discussed the challenges involved in bringing the Internet to the two thirds of the world s population who don t have it yet. He identified one of the key areas as using less data by improving the efficiency of the apps we use. binu has developed a mobile internet application platform that can deliver cloud-based applications and services faster and using less data than other mobile application technologies and is building an integrated mobile experience for the next 2 billion Internet users. 5 Is Connectivity a Human Right, August 2013 Page 7 of 6