Sandvine CTO: Usage Management for Congestion Control doesn’t Work

  

Don Bowman (pictured), Sandvine's CTO, was interviewed recently to TELECOM Review October Edition, and provided some insights into the DPI business models - or why service providers are implementing policy based traffic management systems. 

Some quotes:

• Our biggest strength is that we are access agnostic; we provide the same consumer policy on all access technologies and on all access vendors. And that is how powerful we are. Currently they are operating on 2.5G or 3G, 4G or some WiFi offload and some WiMax and these are the types of combinations you are getting. You got a code that is on family plan, or share free to multiple devices and one of those is on a 2.5G and the other one is on a WiFi, and for all of it we can do universal service across all technologies. It is very powerful particularly when there’s transitioning occurring in network technologies like that.
   
• We are subscriber aware and service plan aware. We are also using the charging gateway. So we know if you are using an HTC model, and you know that you are a Sing Tel customer and when you are roaming we know whether you are on a prepaid or postpaid or what service plan you are on
   
• We have a case study with Telefonica, where we concluded that the unlimited social networking plan is the best interest and the network consumer saw their best interest with that, and how they were able to charge and have a higher ARPU
    
• If you want to give the best possible experience to users, predictable pricing is important. Users react poorly if they don’t know what the internet is costing them. Users react best if they know what the price is. So for monetization it is a complex set up of partnership, zero rating and charging the user where they can relate to.
   
• We never see success when they use usage management as a way to control congestion, it doesn’t work

See "Sandvine: Focusing on Transparency and Enabling Best User Experience" - here.