ACG Research:"subscriber and application awareness provides competitive differentiation opportunities" (w/Use Cases)

Article by Michael Kennedy (pictured), Principal Analyst, ACG Research at Fierce Telecom explains the value of subscriber and application awareness to service providers: ".. This expanded networking functionality is being driven on the demand-side by service providers' need to differentiate their services from both competitors and among internal lines of business where service cannibalization is a serious problem; and on the supply-side where more flexible hardware architectures make it possible to combine transport, switching, routing, and DPI capabilities in the same system chassis"

Many of the services listed below are implemented by wireline and wireless providers, as can be seen by some use-cases, embedded in the quoted text below. One of the suggested functions, personal/behavioral advertising, gained some popularity for a very short time few years ago and then failed in North America and Europe due to (unnecessary) privacy concerns [here].

Note that ACG sees the awareness/DPI features as part of the routine infrastructure, and not as standalone devices, the most common deployment topology used today (See also "ACG Research: "Edge routers are augmented with DPI" - here).  
  

"The most straightforward use of network subscriber and application awareness is to create incremental revenue [Starhub] for basic service offerings ..  subscriber and application awareness capabilities can be used to insert subscriber specific advertizing [here, here] into broadband applications .. Parental controls [Turkcell, TalkTalk] are another application of subscriber awareness with very high ROI .. monitoring video Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) scores .. Subscriber and application awareness also increase the trust level associated with network-based security services [SK Telecom, AT&T, Telefonica]"
See "IP networking: Building value through network subscriber and application awareness" - here.