If Cisco has its way, the access points that wireless carriers deploy in support of mobile computing devices are going to get a whole lot smarter.
At the Mobile World Congress 2011 conference today, Cisco launched Cisco Monetization, Optimization, Videoscape Experience (MOVE), a framework for managing mobile computing devices that the company plans to provide to operators of commercial Wi-Fi networks.
Cisco MOVE combines various components of the Cisco technology portfolio starting with the Cisco Content Adaption Engine (CAE). The CAE platform allows mobile network operators to see what kind of device is accessing the network and then tailor the content to best optimize the network bandwidth available to that device. In the case of video, that information is fed through a Cisco Mobile Video Gateway that resides on a Cisco ASR 5000 multimedia gateway.
Cisco today also unveiled a Cisco Aironet 1550 Series outdoor carrier-grade access point that network operators can rely on to deploy Wi-Fi services on a large-scale basis.
According to Jon Morgan, product marketing manager for Cisco’s Service Provider Group, the end user benefits of MOVE are that the network is getting a whole lot smarter about the types of content traveling across it. This means network operators will be able to dynamically sense how much bandwidth is available at any moment and adjust the content being shown automatically.
Chris Kozup, Cisco director of mobility solutions, adds that MOVE is part of Cisco’s ongoing efforts to show how cellular and 802.11n wireless technologies can supplement each other to provide a better overall wireless experience, including the ability to roam across 802.11n wireless networks operated by different carriers.
In the not-too-distant future, mobile computing devices of all types will become a lot more intelligent about what services are available on the network. Taken together, these advances in core-enabling technologies should result in major improvement in the overall mobile computing experience by this time next year.
