Talking Transcoding

Novarra came in for a lot of criticism last year when it deployed its transcoding solution for Vodafone UK. The solution effectively rendered some WAP sites invisible to Vodafone users. We caught up with President and COO, Jayanthi Rangarajan, to ask her about the affair

DM: Now when you deployed that transcoding solution for Vodafone UK, you came in for an awful lot of criticism from some quarters. Was it justified?

JR: The criticism is aged out. The problems were in the first few weeks, and while there is a community that continues to complain, the facts are that the operators are very happy and the mobile content partners are very happy. The actual fact, versus the hype, is that Internet usage in Vodafone UK is now around 1,000 times what it was before we launched with them and it has increased mobile content consumption.

DM: So just run us through the problem if you would please.

JR: What we launched within the first week was a solution in which the mobile user agent was not being passed for some sites because they were not partners of Vodafone UK. There were some specific sites where they were selling wallpapers and they had embedded pricing information into an image, and this is not standard. It was something we had not come across and did not support.
The problem only arose on mobile sites that were not .wap or .mobi. We dont touch those sites, we never did. But there were a lot of people who didnt address their mobile sites as .wap or .mobi. They addressed them as .com, because in the world they were used to, it wasnt possible for their regular website to be rendered on a phone. And people made a big fuss about Vodafone UK, but it was exactly the same solution for Turkcell in Turkey.
So you had certain websites where, because of the way our solution had been implemented, we could not deliver the mobile version. The reason for this was because they were not following the standard conventions, so we could not detect that it was a mobile site. So we were screwing up some sites, and one of them, which was a Bango site, made a huge fuss. We had not tested some of these Bango sites, just as we have not tested all of the 1 billion websites. We were early in the market and trying to deploy as fast as we could. But there were hundreds of sites where we could detect and deliver the mobile site.
There were also some people who thought the solution did not work and that Vodafone was forcing people to use the regular website, and thats not true. For partner sites that had a mobile version, the consumer had the option to see the mobile version. But it was the long tail sites that caused the problem, and some people got very worked up about it, and there was a lot of misunderstanding. I heard someone saying we had screwed up Vodafone Germanys mobile Internet, and we were not even deployed on Vodafone Germany! But we just had to keep quiet and be sensitive to Vodafone UK. So now we provide the mobile user agent and the desktop user agent so they can choose which to deliver to the handset.

DM: So how long did it take to fix the problem?

JR: We implemented the change within 20 days, but I would have to find out how long it took Vodafone to implement it.

DM: So if it was fixed so quickly, why did people go on about it for so long?

JR: Well theres one guy still going on about it. Now he sells a database of handset profiles and hes frustrated because we dont use his database, because we dont need one. So he continued to rant because he believed we threatened his business. Another valid reason was the user agent, which tells you what type of phone it is, we were not passing that to the content providers. Because if we passed this to, say, CNN, they would not give us the regular website, they would give us the mobile version. But the service that Vodafone UK wanted to launch was the real web on your phone. But how do you tell CNN you want their regular web content? Anyway, fast forward a few months, and now, we provide this information to every content provider, so the content provider can process the regular information, but we also give them the type of phone and browser, so they can react to that and present a dedicated mobile site if they have one, or the regular website if they dont.

DM: And despite the criticism, you are convinced of the merits of your transcoding solution?

JR: Of course. Look, we have done about 15 Internet deployments in the last 18 months, and they all work pretty much the same way, so its not a Vodafone UK issue. Its really a quiet change happening in markets that soon you will have the technology on your phone that will allow you to go to any website using the phone in your hand, and youre not limited to CNN and the weather and sport, though we also include those dedicated WAP sites created for phones, and because of our technology, looking at any website will be a good experience on the mobile.
So developers of content will have no need to create mobile sites. You wont have issues where your site only works on nine phones on T-Mobile in Germany or seven phones on Sprint. With the Internet, you have the ability to reach across every device. It enables the mobile content provider to stop thinking about the specific constraints of the browser on the device.
Our service has being launched round the world, with Turkcell, which has 34 million subscribers;  Vodafone UK, 17 million; 3 Italy, 7 million. All these people can access any website on their phone, so long as it has a browser. And we have usage data that show that consumers use it many times a month, and they will pay for accessing the net as a core service. The stats also show that less than 30% of traffic goes to the top sites. So this user activity data shows the long tail of the Internet.
We are on version 7.0 of our solution. The company has being going for eight years, and the reason we are winning most of the opportunities we go for is because we have been doing it for eight years. We have a patent to do on the server what used to be done by the browser on a PC.
The competition is trying to catch up, but we are so far ahead that when we launched streaming video with 3 Hong Kong, which had had our Internet service for a year, within a month, 15% of their users were using it, and users view videos between three and five times a month, and in any one session, they view an average of seven videos. You need scalability to deploy that type of application in a Tier 1 operator.
Also, unlike the competition, we have always had a single vision of what we were going to do. We have people from Motorola and from Lucent and from Spyglass, the company which created the browser that became Internet Explorer. Thats a great heritage. The Internet is 41 million pages a minute and we are bringing that traffic into the operators networks. 
There are other people out there making a lot of noise, but they dont have the people or the technology that we have. If you look at the service that Sprint has launched with Openwave, it takes 60-70 seconds to load. That would take Novarra five seconds, so its critical that the industry does not deploy solutions that do not have the quality. Sprint is responsible for 40% of Openwaves revenue so someone made a decision because they got a really good price, but this is really complex technology. Just because you do compression, it doesnt mean you are qualified to do it on the server.