Ovum & Heavy Reading Analysts Summarize the Broadband Traffic Management Congress

 

Steven Hartley (pictured)  Practice Leader, Telco Strategy Ovum and Graham Finnie, Chief Analyst, Heavy Reading, published their impressions from the recent Broadband Traffic Management Congress (here) held recently in London.  

Steven found it was "refreshing to see examples of how operators are approaching the commercial aspects of managing traffic" rather than a vendor solution show, as in previous years. The main trends were:

• plans tiered by quality of service (QoS) were no longer being touted. The burden of proof required to justify spending on these approaches has always concerned us particularly in the consumer market .. Operators are instead opting for a “gold, silver, and bronze” approach aligned with applications, meaning that the benefits of QoS are aimed at the content provider, which pays for an optimal end-user experience
   
• Deutsche Telekom, Pakistani WiMAX operator PTCL, Du, Orange Group, and Turkcell extolled the virtues of customer segmentation for creating tailored packages
   
• There was a consensus among vendors (with a clear vested interest in promoting their tools’ sophistication) that the future will see operators offering highly tailored packages to end users and content providers. However, this view was somewhat tempered by the operators at the event, which spoke of simplicity and clarity as the key means to win customers (Belgacom, Orange)

Graham Finnie (pictured) also saw "It wasn’t just theoretical speculation—speaker after speaker set out real, deployed examples" and the focus on applications - "Top of the list for now is the use of DPI and related mechanisms to identify social networking apps—especially Facebook—and give them special treatment such as zero-rating or a lower price point (Turkcell, Du).

Other trends:

• top-ups, apps-oriented turbo boosts, and short-term upgrades are all increasingly popular
   
• a strong desire to gain a better understanding of the behaviour of subscribers and applications (Bell Canada) - 2012 looks like being a good year for analytics (see here).

See "Traffic management gets less technical" [Ovum, here] - here and "Broadband Traffic Management: It’s All About The Package" [Heavy Reading, published by Allot, here]