Service providers, including wireless carriers, mobile virtual network operators, and application service providers, are rapidly increasing their capabilities to deliver a broad range of compelling content and services to their customers. This includes communications service providers, in addition to a variety of Web and traditional brands, racing to capture the lucrative mobile content and services market opportunity. However, with the varying bandwidth available across networks and the multitude of devices being used to access content and services, it is difficult to optimize the end-user experience. Often the experience is defined by the least capable subscriber device and lowest-quality network connection. A dynamic services delivery model yields an improved user experience when higher-performance or lower-cost options are available.

Suppliers today are enabling intelligent mobile services and content delivery. Solutions include the ability to optimize the experience for the mobile user based on key parameters such as the network connection, type of device, user location, and/or policies such as least-cost routing. Such powerful services will provide differentiated offerings and important new revenues for service and content providers. This includes the ability to extend the reach of existing 3G content and applications across IP access networks in addition to delivering new services. For example, adaptive content delivery includes the intelligence to deliver "thin" content such as movie trailers or sports clips to handset devices on GPRS connections and "thick" content such as full motion video to laptops over Wi-Fi. Intelligent content delivery also facilitates different commercial plans and economics to deliver flexible product offerings.

Solutions will provide real-time visibility from the service provider network to the mobile device. This enables intelligent converged services in a highly secure and optimized format for each subscriber session independent of the access network technology, user's mobile device, or infrastructure owner. Platforms can be based on scalable, secure architectures that provide real-time visibility on all active user sessions, including the user's presence, location, and session status information in both service-provider-owned and roaming networks.

Key information is exchanged in real time to enable intelligent content-delivery decisions. Typical information collected includes the following:

• Network type
• User location
• Network bandwidth
• Average throughput
• Maximum throughput
• Device type
• Routing and service delivery policies

Most service providers have content offerings available today, although many times offerings are limited and focused on a single least capable mobile device, e.g., a handset, over the lowest-quality network, e.g., 1xRTT or GPRS. By making content available over multiple networks and devices, service providers will be able to enhance and extend existing services and enable new services. As voice ARPU continues to decline, it is new mobile content and services that will drive differentiation and revenue growth. Capturing this opportunity has challenges, especially given that the bandwidth available across networks may differ drastically and the ability to view and display content will be very different from a laptop. Solutions address these challenges for service and content providers: secure user authentications-intelligent secure authentication mechanisms, including SIM authentication and SMS-based authentication. This enables a seamless service experience across public and private networks, including WWAN and WLAN. Integrated service authorization allows providers to associate or disassociate subscribers (e.g., service authorization) with service plans using entries maintained in local subscriber tables, enabling various subscription-based content services. The gateway can use a local subscriber table or cached information from servers to process subsequent subscriber lookup requests to authorize subscribers. Flexible content requests allow users to request content either through a third-party portal or through the integrated user interface on a client.

Figure 1: Intelligent Content Delivery

In real-time session state information, once the user selects content, the management platform is able to receive information on the user's session from the subscriber gateway to optimize the service or content delivery experience. Open-standards communications can occur through standard Web-based interfaces such as XML or SIP. This information is used by the platform to deliver the appropriate format—for example, a high-definition video movie versus a low-quality video clip. Part of the interaction at this stage is delivering content based on policies such as least-cost routing or "best" network delivery. For example, if a high-quality video stream is requested and a higher-quality network is available, the user can be notified of the better network or even automatically switched. Alternatively, the content delivery system could adjust the content to fit the user's session specifications. This also provides the flexibility for either end users or service providers to control costs, for example by only downloading specific bandwidth-intensive services or applications when a free or lower-cost network option becomes available. Finally, with secure content delivery, information can be securely delivered to the subscriber across the secure connection, bypassing any NAT or firewall-traversal issues.

Figure 2 shows an example of two users requesting a streaming video service. One user is on a public WLAN network using a laptop, and the other user is on a 1xRTT or GPRS using a PDA. Solutions collect real-time information on each user as follows:

User A:

• Laptop
• Public Wi-Fi at San Francisco International Airport
• Link speed: 11M
• Last bandwidth test: 1.2 Mbps
• Average throughput: 500 kbps

User B:

• PDA
• GPRS in Livermore, California
• Link speed: 56 kbps
• Last bandwidth test: 46 kbps
• Average throughput: 30 kbps

With this information, the content delivery provider is able to either make a real-time intelligent decision on the delivery of content or, in the example below, provide the user with multiple delivery options. For user A, the video is automatically streamed. For user B, video is not recommended based on the device type and bandwidth available, but is given the option to view a clip of the movie and notified of the nearest WLAN network available to view the full video.

Figure 2: Intelligent Content Delivery Use Case Examples