Openwave Mobility, a software innovator enabling operators to manage and monetize encrypted and unencrypted mobile data, announced today that encrypted traffic travelling on many mobile networks has risen fivefold in just one year and has now reached 60% of all data. Based on current trends, encrypted traffic levels will exceed 80% within 12 months in several regions. This is now one of the biggest areas of concern for mobile network operators as sites such as Google, Facebook and Wikipedia use HTTPS encrypted protocols. The findings are based on observing and analyzing traffic trends at a number of mobile operator customers around the globe.

As networks go "dark", carriers are unable to gain insight into the encrypted data travelling on their networks. Operators can struggle to optimize the traffic and this can seriously impact users' Quality of Experience (QoE). Moreover, some operators are unable to apply filters to block content such as adult material or to identify video streams that could even be used for extreme purposes such as to radicalize vulnerable individuals.

"The dangers with encrypted traffic are very real," said John Giere, CEO of Openwave Mobility. "Only a couple of years ago, it was mainly emails and financial data that were encrypted. Thanks to what some people call the "Edward Snowden effect", content providers are adopting ever-deeper encryption. Even YouTube videos are now delivered over HTTPS protocols. So, the higher the number of videos being consumed by subscribers, the bigger the headache".

Giere continues: "Operators need to consider solutions that optimize the TCP/IP layer of their networks and apply smart heuristics to achieve optimization in the application layer too. There are solutions that can identify bandwidth-hungry objects, even when encrypted, and achieve 50% data savings on HD video, audio and apps. Best of all, they do not compromise subscriber privacy."