Recent Trends in Policy Control [Part 1] (with a warning)

      

Some of the participants in the Policy Control Conference held in Amsterdam last week posted their impressions on the recent market trends.

GOS networks Blog concludes that "It’s clear that policy control is on the agenda for many operators, but there are complexities that remain in implementing solutions. And, the standards are still evolving, so while they help and provide focus, it’s still an evolving situation".

See "#policycontrol conference: what’s required to turn policy into an asset? Visibility" - here.

Don Bowman (picture), Sandvine's CTO, summarizes trends based on the case studies presented during the conference in a port to the company's "The Better Broadband Blog":

• Service providers worldwide are experimenting with high-value services that reflect modern subscriber usage characteristics
   
• Operators are following a path towards subscriber empowerment and complete information transparency, like services where subscribers choose which traffic is most important (this information is then incorporated into personalized congestion management solutions) and have access to granular and up-to-date usage information
   
• Interoperability, ease of deployment, and consistency of information are powerful factors when network providers are choosing vendors
   
• Demonstrably proving and quantifying the quality of experience from the subscriber perspective continues to be a challenge

"Some of the ideas discussed at this conference are already appearing in the marketplace, while others won’t be seen for a few years; nevertheless, the future seems bright not only for players in this space, but also for the ultimate beneficiaries of all the innovation: Internet users"

See "The Future Happened Yesterday – Policy Control Conference" - here.

Susana Schwartz reported on BroadHop's CEO, Bill Diotte (picture), speech during the conference:

"Rather than scratching out a dollar with caps and tiers that disenchant subscribers, operators want to pursue new business models…some spoke of things like sponsored contributions where users pay only a small portion of an overall fee and content and ad sponsors would be the ones to subsidize services".

Nevertheless, Bill warns - "If you have a policy server handling Gx interfaces, Gy for real time charging, as well as northbound interfaces for IMS and voice over LTE [Rx interface] for value-add services, then there is an ever-increasing load of Gx, Gy and Rx to process in real time. Couple the creation of more value-add services with the collapsing of multiple networks onto the same policy platform, and it’s easy to see how transaction loads can get out of control 

See  "BroadHop: Policy implementers seek new revenues, not new integration headaches"  - here.