Tekelec and Tecnotree Integrate their "Independent Policy and Charging Systems"

   
Two of my recent guest posts - "Policy and Charging: The Value of Independence" (here) by Tekelec and "Why Not a Single Vendor for Policy and Charging Controls?" (here) by Openet, probably represent a new marketing battle between the major policy vendors.

It started more than a year ago by Openet (see "S.O.S Call from Openet" - here) and shifted gear when Amdocs acquired Bridgewater Systems and differentiated itself with the value of integrated policy and charging (see "Amdocs Integrates BWS - Introduces a Charging and Policy Management Solution" - here). Infonetics Research helped Amdocs with this positioning as well (see "Infonetics Believes in an "integrated policy/charging solution" - here).

Loyal to its position, Tekelec announced an integrated solution with Tecnotree Corporation - ".. successful interoperability testing between Tekelec's Policy Server (PCRF) and Tecnotree's Real-Time Convergent Charging system. This is the first announced integration between independent policy and charging vendors over the proposed Sy interface. This gives mobile service providers the scalability and Diameter signaling efficiency required to grow their mobile data networks and deliver personalized data plans" 

Source: Openet

" .. The 3GPP and member organizations – including Tekelec and Tecnotree – are developing the Sy interface to improve Diameter-based communications between the PCRF and online charging systems (OCS). The new standard interface is being introduced this year .. The new Sy (see chart) standard provides several advantages to service providers compared with proprietary, pre-integrated approaches .. Improved scalability .. Signaling efficiency .. Flexible usage tracking .. [and] Reduced costs".





See "Tekelec and Tecnotree integrate independent policy and charging systems" - here.

[Infonetics Research Survey - Part 2] - Who are the Leading Policy Management Vendors?

  

Although analysts say now that the crowded policy management market (here) will shift the market leadership from standalone players to the larger system vendors (example - here), currently the dominant players are still the smaller, standalone specialists.

Infonetics Research released some more information from their recent survey "Policy Management Deployment Strategies and Vendor Leadership: Global Service Provider Survey" (see the first part, based on a blog port to the Amdocs blog - here).

According to Shira Levine, directing analyst for next gen OSS and policy at Infonetics Research, "When asked in an open-ended question who they consider to be the top three policy management vendors, service providers named Tekelec/Camiant and Openet as the top two, followed by Bridgewater Systems and Ericsson in a tie for third".  (Bridgewater is now part of Amdocs).

Earlier this year Infonetics said that "Top suppliers in the overall policy management market and in the fast-growing wireless segment held extremely close market share in 2010, with Openet pulling into the lead, followed by Bridgewater and Tekelec " (here). A year ago the order was "Tekelec, Openet, and Bridgewater Systems" (here).

Also a year ago, the Yankee Group ranked the same trio, together with Volubill, Comptel, Telcordia (now part of Ericsson) and Comverse as the leading vendors (here).

Other survey findings:

• "Huawei and Ericsson receive high marks from operators for many buying criteria, including service and support, the #1 supplier selection criterion"
   
• Bandwidth on demand and advanced subscriber control capabilities are operators’ top application drivers for policy management investments, followed by VoIP; operators clearly are interested in using policy to enable more choices and a better experience for the customer

Ms. Levine also agrees that the smaller standalone players domination may be there in the longer term: ".. [recent trends] creates a challenge for the more established policy vendors who have longstanding relationships with operators’ network departments but less sway with IT and marketing teams, while creating new opportunities for IT players such as the billing vendors entering the policy space"

See "Telecom operators rate policy vendors in new Infonetics survey; Tekelec, Openet named top players" - here.

[Update 47: Amdocs PCC Launch] PCRF - DPI Compatibility Matrix

  

Amdocs officially launched its PCC product, based on the acquired Bridgewater Systems products.

Several products were added to the offering, under a new "Network Control" segment including 3G-LTE products (on is the Policy Controller) and "Multi-Access" products.

The press release focuses on the integrated solution - "A unified hardware and software system, the Amdocs Data Experience Solution (see previous posts - here and here) pre-integrates a policy control and charging engine with product catalog and subscriber management functions, and the necessary business support, network interfaces, and pre-configured business processes, to deliver specific, out-of-the-box market offers".

" .. It leverages the market leading network and policy control assets of Bridgewater Systems, including standards-based interfaces and multi-vendor interoperability for ease of deployment into 3G and LTE network environments. Productized APIs (application programming interfaces) enable a single point of integration into provisioning, notification, billing and self-care environments".

The PCRF-DPI matrix (here) was updated to reflect the above, keeping the previous interoperability relations the BWS product had with Allot, Arbor, Cisco and Sandvine.

See "Amdocs Unveils Industry-First, Pre-Integrated Offering for Rapid Creation and Monetization of New Data Services in 3G and LTE Networks" - here.

Amdocs Data Experience Solution Online Launch

  

Amdocs is holding a 4 days (!) online event (Nov 29- Dec 2) to indicate the launch of its Data Experience Solution (see "Amdocs Integrates BWS - Introduces a Charging and Policy Management Solution" - here).

A special site is now open for the event, the agenda is here.  

One of the items on the agenda (Dec 1, 9:00AM EST) is an "Analyst Chat: Service Model Innovation" -Who is implementing what type of services models in the industry? Teresa Cottam (previous posts -here and here) from Telesperience chats about her blog post on the evolution of mobile data services.

Amdocs Integrates BWS - Introduces a Charging and Policy Management Solution

     

David Sharpley,
VP Products and Business, D
ata Experience Business Unit

Amdocs sent a pre-announcement mailer, stating that on "On November 28th, Amdocs will launch the Data Experience Solution.. The Data Experience Solution brings together policy and charging functions to address key use cases for mobile operators" 

  

 ".. it is fully productized, featuring productized integration between the Policy, Charging and Product Catalog functions. It features eight popular market offers – available out of the box and preconfigured as part of the solution – including tiered services, bill shock, bandwidth boost, WiFi offload, LTE services and more. The Data Experience Solution is delivered as a complete package – deployed on a single hardware/software system that will revolutionize the way mobile operators introduce data services". See also - Infonetics Believes in an "integrated policy/charging solution" - here.



Needless to say that the policy management part comes from the Bridgewater acquisition (here) and obsoletes Amdocs' short-living own PCRF product (see - "Amdocs Launches PCRF" - here). The charging part is based on Amdocs' Turbo Charging product.

Also, according to its recent tweets, Bridgewater is now "the Amdocs Data Experience team".

Modeling Policy Server Scale and ROI

     

A month ago I covered the deployment of policy management by Bharti-Airtel (the largest MNO in India with over 170M subscribers). Bharti's IT director said (here) then that "..The challenge that we have is that our scale is huge".

While most networks are significantly smaller, policy management scaling is an issue vendors and operators need to handle. In addition to the growth in data consumption we also see new use-cases and M2M applications (here, here) that will add load to policy servers.

Scaling was addressed by policy server vendors as a competitive advantage for some time now (BroadHop, Bridgewater). Diameter routing/load balancing technology and products (here) were added in recent months to help policy management to scale.

However, something was missing - what are the expected performance requirements?

A new white paper by Graham Finnie (pictured), Chief Analyst, Heavy Reading. (commissioned by BroadHop) builds a model to help set performance goals: "In the past two years, policy management caught fire as network operators sought better ways to manage the way bandwidth is allocated and congestion is handled. Now, many are looking to move on from these early deployments, and seeking to put policy at the heart of their traffic management and service development strategies. But as policy deployments scale up, it raises major new issues for operators. Can policy servers cope as new use cases are added? What will it cost? And can the new business case really stack up?"

Conclusions:

• A 3GPP network of 10 million mobile subscribers will scale, based on our assumptions, from handling about 2,200 TPS in the Base Case to almost 23,000 TPS in the Mature Case, which is assumed to be after three years.
   
• We modeled the TPS impact of beginning the transition to an all-LTE network. This also assumes a network with 10 million subscribers, in which the customers are gradually transitioning to LTE, and that during this transition, wireline customers are also transferred to the same policy environment. In this case, policy scales from nearly 25,000 TPS at the end of Year 1 to more than 75,000 TPS at the end of Year 3.
   
• the cost of policy is only a small proportion (around 2 percent) of the overall cost of a new LTE build over a five-year build period in the next-generation policy case – and given the high strategic value of policy, this suggests to us that the return on investment (ROI) is likely to be positive in the short to medium term

See press release "BroadHop and Heavy Reading Study Finds Policy Servers Must Scale Up Massively as Mobile Operators Move into the LTE Era" - here ; White paper - here.

Survey: "86% of providers plan to launch tiered pricing plans", but will Need New PCC

       

A new Heavy Reading survey, commissioned by Amdocs (following the Bridgewater acquisition) "Interviewed over 30 CSPs from Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific" shows "How CSPs think to monetize data services" and leads to understand how important is policy management - but, unfortunately, not the one most CSPs currently own (does it include current Bridgewater customers?)

Key findings are:

• Over 90% of operators interviewed said that they are looking to create packages across LOBs, customer types or payment methods
   

• Over 80% of interviewed operators said that their future plans include data plan shared between several devices (e.g. tablet, smartphone) and over 65% said their future plans include data plans shared between several family members
   
• 33% of the respondents said it can be done but at a very high integration and deployment cost which will make the project unfeasible.
   
• 86% of providers plan to launch tiered pricing plans

However, it seems that almost everyone is not ready yet and need to buy something new! -

• 80 percent of respondents do not think their existing policy management systems, deployed to support network-related use cases (bandwidth management, fair usage, bill shock) can support more advanced use cases, such as data plans across multiple lines of business, payment methods and spend limits, and more;
   
• 10 percent have tried to integrate charging and policy management systems and failed.

See - Amdocs press release - here; research summary - here; Light Reading story "Pure-Play Policy's Future Is Fading" - here.

Bridgewater is Now "A Division of Amdocs", but Revenues Decline

  
Amdocs completed the acquisition of Bridgewater Systems (see "Amdocs Completes Acquisition of Bridgewater Systems, Enabling Service Providers to Redefine the Data Experience" - here).

BWS web site already reflects that - Bridgewater is now "A Division of Amdocs" (here).

Earlier this week BWS published its Q2 results, showing a significant decline in revenues (see "Bridgewater Systems Reports Q2 2011 Financial Results" - here).

"Total revenue for Q2 2011 was $14.6 million, compared with $22.7 million for Q2 2010. Product revenue for Q2 2011 was $9.3 million, or 63% of total revenue, compared to $17.1 million, or 75% of total revenue, for Q2 2010. The year-over-year decrease mainly reflects two expected and previously disclosed changes: the transition in the Company's business model with its largest customer [see - "Bridgewater Growth - It is all about Verizon"- here] and the expiration of the Alcatel-Lucent Source Code License Agreement in Q4 2010 [see "Bridgewater - Will the Juniper Agreement Replace Alcatel-Lucent Revenues?" - here].

On March, the company provided full-year guidance for 2011 (here), expecting revenues of $88.0 to $100.0M. On May, it was reduced to $77.0 to $87.0M (here). The actual revenues for the first half are $33.7M.

With these results, the price Amdocs is paying for BWS is still (although less then it was during the announcement) attractive compared to the 2010 Tekelec-Camiant deal (see "Camiant Information Exposed (and Compared to Bridgewater" - here).

Amdocs is paying $139M (net of Bridgewater's cash as of June 30, 2011). With estimated ~$70M revenues for 2011, this is a price/sales ratio of ~2, compared to 4.6-5 that Camiant got on its 2010 revenues.

[Update 45: Cisco to Resell Openet; 20 Joint Accounts] PCRF - DPI Compatibility Matrix

 

Although Cisco has recently launched its own PCC/PCRF product (IPCF - here), it seems that it continues to tighten its relations with the leading pure-players vendors.

This may confirm the conclusion of a recent review made by Joe McGarvey (pictured), Principal Analyst IP Services Infrastructure, Current Analysis: "While Cisco’s recently introduced policy control is strong on paper in several areas, the company will not be able to validate any of its performance or functionality claims until it rings up a few customer wins" (here).

Openet announced that "Cisco Systems has signed a global reseller agreement for Openet’s complete product suite including Policy Manager, Convergent Charging .. all running on Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) .. Openet integrates with the following Cisco products: ASR 5000, CSG, CSG2, SCE and eGGSN".

"Joint deployments at Turkcell and Meteor Ireland in 2010, along with deployments with operators in Japan, Austria and the Netherlands, have driven Openet and Cisco Systems to agree to a comprehensive set of reseller terms covering commercial and technical services, as well as support models .. This agreement builds upon seven years of co-selling with Cisco on more than 20 accounts, including Orange and other service providers".

Possibly, the recent leaked documents - "AT&T Tests Openet & Cisco for LTE: Session based Pricing, Speed Tiers" - here - also explain the upgraded relations.

See "Continued Joint Deployments Drive Global Reseller Agreement with Cisco Systems" - here.

See also: "Volubill - Cisco Joint Projects" - here and "Bridgewater and Broadhop are Getting Closer to Cisco" - here.

Computaris Will Deliver a PCRF/DPI Solution to an Eastern European MNO

  

R Systems announced that " .. Computaris .. (wholly owned subsidiary of R Systems International Limited) a leading consultant and system integrator in the communication industry, was chosen by a major Eastern European mobile operator to deliver an end-to-end Policy Management solution for their NGN architecture due to be live in 2011".

See "Computaris, an R Systems business, wins an end-to-end project for Policy Management Solution to an Eastern European Mobile Network Operator" - here.

Computaris specializes in consultancy, system integration and software development for the mobile telecoms industry in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Their partner page (here) shows Bridgewater Systems (soon to be Amdocs) as a partner. The Reference and Case study page (here) lists also Acision, Comverse, Orga and Redknee. The term "policy traffic switch" mentioned below is Sandvine's DPI product name.

Back to the new project: " Computaris proposed an access network agnostic mobile broadband solution that will enable the Operator to introduce new, advanced data services and to optimize the existing network capacity through the application of sophisticated traffic shaping and fair usage policies in real time significantly improving users’ experience.

Computaris Policy Management solution is sufficiently flexible and extensible to achieve the Operator’s business objectives and vision of Subscriber Management and Control and is based on:

• Best of breed DPI and traffic enforcer product that will help the Operator manage and capitalize on the explosive growth in mobile data;
• A subscriber Data management tool that brings together rich subscriber data such as location, context, profile and usage with the sophisticated tools to manage that data to multiple systems and applications to personalize services products;
• Policy Traffic Switches that enable detailed reporting and vendor-agnostic interoperability;

Infonetics: Policy Management Market, Driven by Wireless Congestion, is Congested

   

Last month Infonetics Research published its semi-annual report covering the policy management market (here). Shira Levine, the analyst behind the report was interviewed to Susana Schwartz (picture) of Connected Plant and added some more details:

"Because of that growing demand, there are many players now entering the policy market, with Openet now ranking as the top player in what is becoming a very hotly contested area. It’s incredibly tight, as the top players are all within one million dollars of each other .. Bridgewater and Tekelec as other top players ..You have so many different vendors now getting into policy as the need for integration with real-time charging grows. You have Comverse and Amdocs, and IT players like HP"

"There are more and more investments in policy solutions driven by certain use cases built around campaign management, loyalty programs, acquisition-and-retention initiatives, bill shock, or the desire to do more creative charging and bundling of over-the-top services like Netflix or YouTube with certain QoS guarantees"

See "Managing exploding wireless, over-the-top usage drives policy market" - here.

Juniper Adds Openet to its Policy Management Portfolio

  

2 months ago Bridgewater Systems announced a partnership with Juniper in which "Juniper Networks will resell Bridgewater's complete control plane portfolio globally, as an integral component of Juniper's MobileNext, the industry's first open mobile core for 2G/3G and LTE networks" (see "Juniper Announces MobileNext" - here).

Today, Openet announced that "Juniper Networks has selected the Company as a strategic partner, and will resell Openet’s policy management and charging platforms as part of Juniper’s MobileNext solution announced in February".

Difficult choice for Juniper customers, as both lead the market (see here and here).

See "Openet and Juniper Networks Partner To Deliver Increased Control and Flexibility to Mobile Operators Through Policy and Charging Platform Solution" - here.

Infonetics: 2010 Policy Management Market up 48%, Openet Leads

    

A new research by  Shira Levine (picture), directing analyst for next gen OSS and policy at Infonetics Research, concludes that "Policy management revenue grew 48% in 2010 to $418.7 million worldwide, with the majority of spending occurring in the wireless market ..policy management market to nearly quadruple from 2010 to 2015, to $1.6B".

Previous Infonetics report said - "Policy Servers Market to reach $471M in 2010" - here ; Analysis Mason numbers: "Policy Management Market Reached $382M; Forecast 23% CAGR for the next 5 years" - here.
  

See "Policy management market up 48% year-over-year, quadrupling by 2015" - here.

"Top suppliers in the overall policy management market and in the fast-growing wireless segment held extremely close market share in 2010, with Openet pulling into the lead, followed by Bridgewater and Tekelec .. Skyrocketing machine-to-machine connections will drive growth in the policy management markets, as operators deploy solutions that identify and track M2M traffic and apply policy rules based on transaction type, time of day, network congestion, etc." (See "Tekelec Prepares Policy Management for M2M Communication" - here).

Bridgewater - Will the Juniper Agreement Replace Alcatel-Lucent Revenues?

    

Bridgewater Systems published its Q4 and 2010 results yesterday (see "Bridgewater Systems Reports Q4 & Full-Year 2010 Financial Results" - here).

One of the recent highlights is the reselling agreement with Juniper , announced during MWC (see "Juniper Announces MobileNext - "Open mobile core for 2G/3G and LTE networks"; Partners with Bridgewater, Openwave" - here).

Nevertheless, a source-code licensing agreement the company had with Alcatel-Lucent expired on October 2010. During the results conference call, BWS' CFO, Kim Butler (picture), said that the agreement generated revenues of CAD $8M during 2010 - no doubt with very high margin.

As for the expectations from the Juniper agreement - CEO Ed Ogonek, said that Bridgewater will be selling its portfolio through Juniper; the agreement is in place and they are in process of getting it fully integrating into the operational sales processes of Juniper. They are working together on a pipeline and Ed expects to see the benefits in back half of the year as they have very strong customer

    

Bridgewater Systems published its Q4 and 2010 results yesterday (see "Bridgewater Systems Reports Q4 & Full-Year 2010 Financial Results" - here).

One of the recent highlights is the reselling agreement with Juniper , announced during MWC (see "Juniper Announces MobileNext - "Open mobile core for 2G/3G and LTE networks"; Partners with Bridgewater, Openwave" - here).

Nevertheless, a source-code licensing agreement the company had with Alcatel-Lucent expired on October 2010. During the results conference call, BWS' CFO, Kim Butler (picture), said that the agreement generated revenues of CAD $8M during 2010 - no doubt with very high margin.

As for the expectations from the Juniper agreement - CEO Ed Ogonek, said that Bridgewater will be selling its portfolio through Juniper; the agreement is in place and they are in process of getting it fully integrating into the operational sales processes of Juniper. They are working together on a pipeline and Ed expects to see the benefits in back half of the year as they have very strong customer opportunities driven by Juniper sales.

Maybe this partially explains the modest expected revenue growth (if any). The company guidance for 2011 is for revenues in the range of $88.0 to $100.0 million - compared to revenue of $93.4 million for 2010, which was increase of 40%.

Juniper Announces MobileNext - "Open mobile core for 2G/3G and LTE networks"; Partners with Bridgewater, Openwave

  

Juniper Networks announced "MobileNext, the industry's first open mobile core for 2G/3G and LTE networks .. MobileNext is a suite of software that runs on Juniper Networks industry leading MX 3D Universal Edge Router and Junos® software platform. MobileNext delivers on the "Project Falcon" initiative with breakthrough products, solutions and business models that address the needs of mobile operators today"

See "Juniper Networks Delivers MobileNext — Industry's First Open Mobile Core for Service Innovation" - here. See also a white paper from ABI Research - "Juniper MobileNext: Bending the Mobile Cost Curve" - here (see chart below for the summary of findings).

"MobileNext, with industry leading scalability of mobile sessions, set up rates and forwarding capacity, enables high-definition voice and video delivery with seamless handoff between 3G and LTE for non-interrupted user experience while integrating a rich portfolio of in-line IP services. These in-line services, including Deep Packet Inspection, Traffic Direct for Internet offload, Carrier Grade NAT, Firewall, Video Optimization, MPLS, and Application Load Balancing, provide deployment flexibility and dramatically reduce TCO to mobile operators".

The following vendors announced a partnership with Juniper:

• Bridgewater Systems announced that "Juniper Networks will resell Bridgewater's complete control plane portfolio globally, as an integral component of Juniper's MobileNext, the industry's first open mobile core for 2G/3G and LTE networks".  See "Juniper Networks and Bridgewater to Partner on End-to-End Mobile Packet Core Solution" - here. 
   
• Openwave Systems announced that "Juniper Networks has selected the Company as a strategic partner to integrate its Media Optimizer into Juniper’s Media Flow solution for mobile video optimization. The combined solution is expected to dramatically improve the economics of delivering video over mobile networks while revolutionizing the user viewing experience". See "Juniper Networks Partners with Openwave to Redefine Mobile Video Delivery and Revoltionize User Viewing Experience" - here.

PCRF Deployments (51): Mobily [Saudi Arabia] Uses Bridgewater’s PCRF w/Cisco SCE

 

Bridgewater Systems announced that "Etihad Etisalat (Mobily) (ETEL.AD), the largest provider of mobile broadband in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has selected and rapidly implemented the Bridgewater(R) Policy Controller for data traffic (PCRF) to manage mobile data communication growth and deliver innovative services on Mobily's nationwide 3G/HSPA+ network"

See "Mobily Goes Live with Bridgewater PCRF for 3G" - here.

Mobily, has over 18M subscribers and more than 2.3M customers subscribed to its high-volume mobile broadband bundles, has implemented the Bridgewater Policy Controller/PCRF, integrated with the Cisco Service Control Engine enforcement solution for its nationwide 3G/HSPA+ based mobile broadband network.

Walid Thabet (picture), Director, Data & Solutions Services, Mobily said: "... We look forward to further extending our deployment of Bridgewater to enable differentiated services, and for a common control plane across all of our fixed and mobile networks".

MWC PR - DPI Vendors Focus on Products, PCRF Vendors on Momentum

  

MWC is about to open, and the PR engine going to high gear. Many announcements were already made, trying to avoid crowded Monday.

The DPI vendors announced new devices (see - Tellabs, Allot, Sandvine, Procera - the latter with a customer name!) - focusing on technology while the PCRF vendors decided to focus on "momentum" releases - with the lack of better messaging, I guess. Comptel was an exception, presenting a customer (here) but Bridgewater, BroadHop, Tekelc and Openet were more general. 

Bridgewater Systems announced that "... during 2010 it surpassed management of more than 10 million devices supporting a range of machine-to-machine (M2M) applications. Bridgewater enables mobile operators to offer a variety of M2M services by securely managing M2M connections on 3G and 4G networks using intelligent broadband controls such  as device service control, dynamic policy control, and device identity management ..These deployments support numerous M2M applications such as smart meters for utility companies, automotive infotainment services, in-vehicle tracking devices, and mobile payment services".

See "Bridgewater Surpasses 10 Million Machine-to-Machine Connections" - here.

BroadHop reported that "... The Company continues to see explosive growth primarily in Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific markets where it has secured 12 Quantum Network Suite customers since the platform’s launch in February 2010 as service providers look to deploy new policy-enabled services and applications. As a result, the company reported record results, with revenue growing by more than 80% in FY2010".

See "BroadHop Announces 12 New Customer Wins for Market Leading Quantum Network Policy Suite in 2010" - here. At least 4 wins are recycled and were already announced (see here) - all remain anonymous.

Tekelec- "Tekelec’s market leading, policy-based solutions are being deployed by 44 operators serving over 280 million customers globally. This includes 32 tier-one operators such as Verizon Wireless (here), Vodafone Group (here), Telefónica (here), and Sprint".

See "Tekelec Showcases Solutions to Increase Mobile Data Revenues and Optimize the Customer Experience at Mobile World Congress 2011" - here. 

Openet announced that its "... 2010 revenue is up by more than 60 percent over 2009 .. New devices and higher speed technologies have combined to generate real-time transaction management and network congestion challenges that drew attention in 2010, which in turn has spurred significant market interest in Openet overall, especially in policy management. As a result of having a powerful product to meet policy demand, Openet secured or furthered strategic partnerships with Cisco, Allot and VPI Systems".

See "Openet Drives 60 Percent Revenue Growth Over 2009" - here.

Niall Norton (picture), CEO of Openet said: “2010 was another year of growth and innovation for Openet, and it shows in every aspect, from our financials to our traction in policy management to our involvement with charging for the iPad (see "AT&T Uses Openet for iPad Monetization" - here and "Openet - Why AT&T Changed its IPad Service plans?" - here)”

Good luck to all on MWC next week!

MetroPCS LTE Service Plans: "Pay to use Applications"

 

3 months ago Bridgewater Systems announced a win for MetroPCS (See "PCRF Wins: Bridgewater Selected by MetroPCS" - here). The service plans announced then were very general, so I was wondering why MetroPCS needed a policy server.

It seems that the new Net Neutrality rules (see "Net Neutrality Approval Reopens US Market for DPI and Policy Management" - here) encouraged the carrier to go ahead with an innovative service plans.

MetroPCS announced yesterday 3 service plans for its new LTE services (see "MetroPCS' New 4G LTE Plans Offer Unprecedented Value and Choice with Prices Starting at Just $40" - here), where the cheapest one ($40/Month) allows "unlimited talk, text, 4G Web browsing with unlimited YouTube access". In other words - no VoIP, No P2P and discriminating (blocking) of non-YouTube video traffic.

If you want more - you should pay $50 (gets you "mobile instant messaging, corporate e-mail and 1 GB of additional data access") or even $60 ("unlimited data access").

Of course, to implement all this one needs a policy server and a DPI system - to identify YouTube, for example, and block other applications for the $40 customers.

See also my recent coverage of a presentation made by Allot and Openet suggesting a similar concept ("Allot - Openet: Monetizing and Controlling OTT Applications Use Cases" - here and chart below). Note that the PCRF is the MetroPCS case comes from Bridgewater.

Was 2010 a Good Year for Traffic Management Shares?

 

Yes, thank you. 2010 was a very good year. 3 of the 4 shares I follow beat the NASDAQ index (+16.9% during 2010), led by the phenomenal rally of Allot:

• Allot Communications (NASDAQ:ALLT): +195.4%
• Sandvine Corporation (TSX:SVC): +117.8%
• Procera Networks (AMEX:PKT):  +40.9%
• Bridgewater Systems (TSX:BWC): +3.4%

Happy New Year!

UK: Public Pressure on ISPs to Enforce Parental Control (Killing a VAS?)

  

Chris Williams reports to The Register that "Campaigners will meet with the internet minister, Ed Vaizey,  to lobby for ISPs to be forced to control access to pornography. Vaizey issued the invitation to Tory backbencher Claire Perry, (picture) who said the availability of sexual material online is "a fire is burning out of control". The minister offered to act as an "honest broker" between campaigners and ISPs in the hope that action will be agreed"

See also "Claire Perry MP calls for a new "Opt-in" Model for Accessing Internet Pornography" - here and the video below.

"As a mother with three children I know how difficult it is to keep children from seeing inappropriate material on the Internet. We already successfully regulate British TV channels, cinema screens, high street hoardings and newsagent shelves to stop children seeing inappropriate images and mobile phone companies are able to restrict access to adult material so why should the Internet be any different? British Internet Service Providers should share the responsibility to keep our children safe so I am calling for ISP's to offer an "Opt In" system that uses age verification to access pornographic material".



Source: Cisco



As can be seen from the posts below, web filtering regulation and service is indeed more common in mobile, as kids are using it outside of their parents’ reach. For fixed services, this may be offered as a Value added Service, part of a larger parental control package (which will also stop cyber bullying - inappropriate adult-child chats, messages, SMS and Emails).

However, any regulation - and certainly one that mandates Opt-in to allow access to adult material will take away the revenue opportunity for the ISPs.

A number of vendors of DPI and/or policy management products offer a network based, policy-controlled, paternal control solution (e.g. Sandvine and Bridgewater, Cisco (SCE), Cisco ASR-5000, Radware, BroadHop).

Related posts:

• DPI Deployment (15) : TalkTalk Uses Huawei to Detect Malware (or Parental Control?) - here
• DPI Deployments (9): Orange France Selects Openet and Cisco for Parental Control and Tethering Prevention - here
• Australia: Telstra, Optus and Primus Agree to Voluntarily Block Illegal Web Traffic - here.
• Kosher Mobile Internet - Cellcom Israel Offers Web Filtering - here