ChinaNetCenter Enters The Mobile Web Acceleration Market

As the market for web acceleration services continues to grow, driven primarily by mobile usage, ChinaNetCenter has thrown their hat into the ring with a new mobile application acceleration solution. The company, which has more than 500 POPs in China and more than two dozen POPs outside of China, is using an adaptive policy based solution. It integrates their mobile application acceleration SDK, what they call mSDK, with an intelligent context aware technology designed to get information from the mobile end, such as the brand, OS version, network type and app’s quality of service.

The company says it’s very easy to integrate their mSDK to iOS and Android and that it takes one developer less than 30 min to integrate it into their native app with less than four lines of code. Because all of their CDN cache servers have what they call an mSmart component that communicates with the mSDK, it allows them to optimize every TCP/UDP connection. Their platform also decides the priority of the content being delivered, ensures that the highest priority content is transmitted first, and selectively queues content in the system buffer.

The company said they found that regular connection optimization methods in the industry like TCP/Http Keep Alive and Google SPDY contributes very little improvement, because they have the side effect of involving more competition for the limited available bandwidth. So ChinaNetCenter uses a proprietary intelligent adaptive protocol to control the connection that decides the adaptive policy for transmission and content and optimization parameters based on environment information gathered by the mSDK.

By the end of 2013, China had over 618 million Internet users, 80 percent of which access the Web via their smartphones. At the same time, a huge amount of startups are bringing mobile apps on the market and traditional enterprises are also working to migrate existing application to the mobile platform. In early 2013, one of the biggest online map application companies came to ChinaNetCenter for help to improve their mobile end-user performance. The customer complained that while they were already using a CDN, when they looked at the performance numbers, it simply wasn’t effective for mobile clients. They were considering disabling mobile viewing all together as they didn’t want to provide a bad user experience.

This is something I hear often from content owners, that traditional CDNs aren’t providing a true platform for mobile content acceleration. While some CDNs like Akamai have been in the mobile acceleration market for a while, and smaller CDNs like EdgeCast and Fastly are also focusing on this segment, most CDNs don’t really address the performance issues around delivering content to mobile. It’s one of the reasons why new startups like Instart Logic have emerged in the industry, specifically to focus on improving the performance of content delivered across mobile devices.

ChinaNetCenter said their customer’s install base of 100M users for their online map application app saw an average performance gain of over 40%, and in some low speed wireless network environments, the performance gain was as high as 100%. Earlier this year, the biggest online reading application in China also started using ChinaNetCenter’s mobile application acceleration platform and saw their app’s utilization ratio increase by 20%. Another customer, a local airline in the country, saw their order rate conversion increase by 10% through their app’s performance improvement.

For web browsing, mobile content consumption is the future and multiple vendors are now focusing on acceleration technologies to address the specific issues caused by wireless networks, which tend to have high latency and a large percentage of packet loss. With their new solution in the market, we can now count ChinaNetCenter as yet another vendor who has recently entered the mobile application acceleration market, with more to come.

ChinaNetCenter is the leading CDN provider in China with revenue of $197M in 2013. Backed by ChinaNetCenter, MileWEB was established in 2012 as the international development partner tasked with globalizing their next generation CDN services and solutions.