Network Operators understand Networks…

Developers understand Applications…

DownWing experts bridge the gap.

During their years at AT&T Research Labs, Ed Lambert and Doug Sillars worked deep in the trenches with developers creating the most popular mobile applications in the world.    By directly supporting their efforts, and collaborating between developers and network researchers to solve emerging issues, they not only helped solve near-term issues, but also helped create and socialize the Best Practices for mobile application development.   

Through hands-on analysis with major app developers, Ed and Doug found and fixed major issues such as:

• Caching issues

• Compression issues

• Duplication of content

• Connection management issues

• Over-delivery of video/audio quality for intended devices

Ed and Doug then openly shared and evangelized the lessons they learned as Best Practices and helped integrate them into the major operating platforms and their respective developer ecosystems.  Doug went further and authored the O’Reilly book, “High Performing Android Applications”, which remains a key reference on application optimization.

Additionally, Ed and Doug led the development and adoption of Application Resource Optimizer (now known as Video Optimizer).  This open-source, industry-leading tool captures application traffic, as well as high-res screen recordings, evaluates conformance to Best Practices, pinpoints issues, and enables deep analysis of mobile applications.

Working with some of most popular applications on mobile networks, Ed and Doug helped drive optimizations that significantly reduced network traffic worldwide.   In addition to significant capital cost savings for operators, these optimized applications performed better for end users, and reduced energy use across the delivery chain. The total energy savings of these efforts was estimated by The Carbon Trust to save over 25,000 tons of CO2 each year.

Following his retirement from AT&T, Ed remains Chair of the GSMA Application Optimization Working Group and continues driving advanced research in Best Practices for Sustainability as well as Best Practices for Latency-sensitive Applications using 5G and Edge Compute.

The team at DownWing believes that resources on this planet are finite.  Rather than offering more complexity to solve problems, we put intense focus on simplifying and optimizing to make the best possible use of network, energy, and human resources.