Heavy Reading: Policy Control - a Smarter & Cheaper Alternative to RAN Congestion

  

A new report from Heavy Reading analyzes the ways available for MNOs to deal with the demand for data and the resulting RAN/backhaul congestion - and policy management standout.

  

Tim Kridel (picture), Contributing Analyst, analyzes the cause for congestion (smartphone traffic and signaling) and the different methods to cope with it (up-charge, caps etc).

   

In addition Tim says that "A smarter alternative is policy control [chart below]-- a broad category of standards and products that give carriers deep, actionable insights into their traffic and greater ability to manage that traffic, including for individual customers, groups of customers or types of applications and services. Put simply, if carriers can track it, there is a good chance they can manage and even monetize it ..  Policy control products typically cost around $1 million to $5 million, which is peanuts compared to alternatives, such as splitting hundreds of cell sites, deeply subsidizing femtocells, bringing Ethernet backhaul to every urban and suburban site, or building out a Wi-Fi hotspot network. It is also far less expensive than trying to overcome a negative market perception that the network is lousy"

See "Breaking Bad on RAN Congestion" - here and executive summary - here.