Bypass Network Services to launch Global Mode for mobile in India

Bypass Network Services Limited (Bypass) is excited to announce an agreement has been reached with Varun Sood to represent Bypass in India. The focus of the partnership is the emerging market of geo-unblocking for mobile providers. The agreement is to provide mobile operators and fixed line Internet providers in India with local market representation for Bypass’ world first geo-unblocking product Global Mode. The relationship is already showing benefits with two prominent ISPs in India undertaking the first stages of due diligence.

Varun, an Oxford Business School MBA, joins Bypass with an extensive background in International Business Development & Strategy. Bypass selected Varun based on his professional experience and business relationships in Asia, Africa, and Europe and the understanding of Net Neutrality principles.

“Now is the perfect time for mobile operators to be considering Global Mode due to the Net Neutrality debate,” says Varun. “Bypass is a strong advocate for Net Neutrality, and deploying Global Mode enhances consumer choice to differentiate a mobile offer in a competitive market to grow revenue.”

Net Neutrality is very important for India’s future economic growth. Global Mode is designed to remove unjustified commercial barriers on the internet which restrict the customer’s right to use the Internet the way they choose. ISP’s who support Net Neutrality should be seriously considering the role they can play in removing geo-blocking at a technical level, not just as a policy statement.

Smart DNS services are estimated to be used by over 25% of global Internet users though mainly technical savvy users. Global Mode is integrated into the broadband network to automatically enable geo-blocking removal for ALL users on the network. Thus, it’s much simpler to implement and increases the value of the connection through bundling.

“Only four countries in the world have this method of geo-blocking removal in place. We’re excited to be working with Varun, helping to open up parts of The Internet in India that have until now been inaccessible. Research has shown that the more The Internet is open, the more economic benefit a country receives.” said Patrick Jordan-Smith, CEO of Bypass.

About Bypass Network Services Limited

Bypass provides PaaS products for residential Internet service providers & mobile operators to rapidly capture market share & reduce churn through differentiating their offer in a competitive market. Global Mode® is the world’s first network level managed geo-unblocking solution. Global Mode® is a PaaS and can be deployed in any size broadband network in under ½ a day.

Netflix plays Whac-a-Mole, consider PaaS!

If you haven’t heard of Whac-A-Mole it’s a popular arcade where the object of the game is to force the individual moles back into their holes by hitting them directly on the head with the mallet. The term was used recently by Netflix as reported by Fairfax recently when they asked us about the impact of Netflix’s reported crackdown.

PaaS, it’s been a bit of a buzz word and yes we use it too, but think about it, do you really want to play ‘whac-a-mole’ with Netflix, is this your core business? As the CEO of one of our customers said me the other day over lunch, “I don’t want to invest in becoming a  DNS proxy specialist, that’s why we have you.”

We use the term PaaS because we consider Global Mode® a platform, and you can’t rent tin from us, and SaaS is more akin to a business service. The point isn’t how you define cloud services; it’s why do you use them?

Separation of Responsibilities

A quick look in our accounting system and it’s obvious, we have 161 vendors to manage to provide our service. Sure, out of that list we retain a specialist legal council, we call on our accountant for advice, and I’m sure our local micro-brewery is in that list too. Consider 25% of our contacts are overheads; that means we deal with ≈120 vendors we to run the platform.

Then you have to consider Hulu took these same measures last year to block services that circumvent geolocation restrictions. Don’t get me wrong we consider this an issue, but it’s a headache we have to manage.  Would you prefer to have one of your staff create a mitigation plan or receive a proactive call from your PaaS provider to say they’ve been planning for this, then advise you of the solution? It’s a bit of a no-brainer, but in my experience, in the SaaS/PaaS sector continuous improvement is nearly always overlooked.

Whatever the offer, you can tell a good PaaS provider by the number of updates you get in your product. If you don’t get new features, new reporting, new user interfaces then they’re not taking the money you pay them and reinvesting it into improving the product.

When Hulu announced their plans we had taken certain measures already, that’s why we created VIPER, our transparent DNS proxy. That took about three months, imagine if you had a core service used by ¼ of your customers every day, but it wasn’t operating at 100% effectiveness. What flow on impact would this have to your call centre and ultimately your brand?

Since then we’ve taken even more, we launched DELUGE, our TCP acceleration software and proxy network. This is key to the whack-a-mole game, as it’s how we manage client-side and server-side proxies and traffic to create a high-performance solution. In the ‘old days’ without DELUGE, we wouldn’t have been able to scale and support the influx of hundred’s of thousand’s of new users concurrently without any issues.

We also look at business processes, and something any organisation can consider, is process automation for deploying software. At BNSL, we use ansible to  automate new site deployments and management application configuration  – think about how fast we need to do this when we start playing whack-a-mole with Hulu & Netflix.

It’s our job to make the web a better place.  That means we need to be experts at managing the moving parts for our platform so we can win the whack-a-mole and avoid getting ‘smacked’ by the Netflix mallet.

BNSL implements first wholesale network with Vibe Communications, enables all users as standard without notification to provide open Internet access.

The Global Mode® implementation was completed in a matter of hours. We like that we’re not responsible for the on-going operations and maintenance so offering the service doesn’t detract from core network projects. The managed Global Mode® service is more cost effective when we consider than the time it would take internally to build and run the network. Their support team is responsive, they’ve maintained 100% up-time since day one and the underlying scalability of their network suits our demanding global traffic profiles. – Davey Goode – CTO Vibe Communications