Converged Networks Challenges - Policy management and Real time Charging

  

Gary Rieschick, Director, Wireless & Broadband Solutions for Openet posted an article to the company's blog on policy management in converged networks (while claiming that convergence isn’t yet happening - ".. operators need to manage usage in a converged manner creating huge hurdles ahead").
  

As far as Policy management is concerned - "wireline networks are less complex than wireless and are chock full of legacy infrastructure. This means that operators have a hard time merging the two and deploying effective policy management strategies such as tiered services when the policy enforcement points have smaller sets of functionalities but this varies slightly from vendor to vendor ..
 
Nevertheless, how can operators benefit from converged networks? "There are many benefits, including offloading data, which can effectively reduce network capacity augmentation costs while supporting new business models…cross selling services across networks"

See "Let’s Get Together: Convergent Policy Management" - here.

Orga System says that convergence ".. has proven a challenge to the BSS vendors due to real-time requirements of the prepaid world and the number of subscribers ..end-to-end convergent billing solutions have to offer real-time charging, billing and financial management capabilities"

See "Convergence – old hat with new challenges" - here.

Related post - "AT&T Seeks Unified Policy Management for Wireline and Wireless" - here.