Facebook may be the archetypal over-the-top player, but like Google, it is starting to take an interest in underlying network technologies and how it might harness them to enhance its services. Its most recent move in this direction is to show a keen interest in certain LTE capabilities, particularly LTE Direct and Multicast. The prospect of Facebook endorsing these technologies at Qualcomm’s recent Uplinq developer conference will send a shiver down the spines of cellcos, which hope to exploit their control and knowledge of LTE to enrich their own services, including multicast and voice, and so to differentiate themselves from over-the-top rivals.
Facebook’s VP of engineering, Jay Parikh, told the Uplinq audience that the company is planning services which rely on LTE Multicast and LTE Direct. The latter is a peer-to-peer technology which supports localized services, within 500 meters of the user, without the need to go via a base station.
This would drive new user experiences and advertising opportunities, said Parikh because the use of licensed spectrum can provide some guarantees that are tough to achieve with unlicensed WiFi – in areas such as privacy and security, for instance. “LTE Direct would let us expose or create user experiences around serendipitous experiences with friends nearby,” he added.
LTE Direct could be another mechanism for Facebook and its advertisers to know exactly where users are, and what they are doing, in order to target them more precisely with promotions and information. For instance, they could find out about impromptu meetings and events more easily.
Qualcomm, which never misses a chance to advocate the use of LTE over WiFi, despite its Atheros division, claims that LTE Direct is “iBeacon on steroids” – more battery efficient, secure, autonomous and interoperable compared to similar device-to-device services using WiFi.
The chip giant is one of the companies leading the standardization of LTE Direct in 3GPP Release 12. It said it is working closely with Facebook to identify, build and test different use cases. It will have high hopes that such efforts will expand the value and usefulness of LTE beyond conventional cellcos, and into realms more commonly inhabited by WiFi – an agenda even more aggressively pursued in its spearheading of LTE-Unlicensed (in which LTE downlink capacity is augmented by running some LTE carriers in licence-exempt 5GHz ‘WiFi spectrum’).
In the case of LTE Direct, for instance, it seems likely that Facebook will turn to that and so sideline its own GPS-based platform, called Nearby. Makesh Makhijani, senior director of technical marketing at Qualcomm, said the firm had been working on Direct for seven years and optimized its performance so it can be always-on, but without draining the handset’s battery, perhaps the most important factor in encouraging consumer uptake. “Your mobile phone will get to know you intimately,” he said. “LTE Direct is one piece of that.”
He added: “LTE Direct is a common standard that enables services that are always on at scale and interoperable. The impact on battery doesn’t change as more people get added to it, and it’s part of a 3GPP standard, so interoperability works day one.”
Qualcomm showcased various real world trials of LTE Direct at Uplinq. For instance, the Sacramento Kings basketball team are using it to support social discovery and promotions during games; Yahoo spoke about powering hyper-local news feeds; and R/GA Lab had used Direct to create a shared experience on a big screen in Times Square, New York, during the last New Year’s Eve celebrations. That would work even when other networks were failing because of intense usage, said the company.
Another LTE technology which can deliver content to many users while remaining kind to the network is LTE Multicast or Broadcast. This is also a key focus for Qualcomm developers and the chip designer gained Facebook support here too.
At Uplinq, Qualcomm announced an LTE Broadcast software development kit (SDK) and said programmers would be able to access a common API that could be used anywhere in the world.
The main trials of this technology have focused on delivering the same content to many users at once in sporting events or similar scenarios – without the network strain of unicasting to each of them individually. However, there are many other business cases, including a revival of actual mobile TV services, many of which foundered because they required specialist networks such as Qualcomm’s own FLO. And Facebook is interested in the potential to use LTE Multicast to distribute large software or information updates efficiently to large numbers of users.
Parikh, noting that Facebook now had 400m users who only accessed the site or app from mobile devices, said: “We need the experience to be as fast, efficient, and as reliable as possible on mobile”, especially when issuing app upgrades (which it does every couple of weeks).