Mobile data growth: what’s your recipe for profit?

 

Policy control once again looks set to be one of the trending topics of telecoms in 2011. Partly this is driven by the gap between growth in mobile data traffic, spurred by the onslaught of new devices and applications and the corresponding revenues. Partly it’s the idea that operators are simply running out of spectrum and therefore data bandwidth. And partly it’s driven by the already very real issue of network congestion, caused by intensive bandwidth applications such as video, that has a detrimental effect on the customer experience. Lastly, it’s driven by the need for service providers to launch innovative new services to help bridge the revenue gap and create market differentiation. No wonder policy is so topical.

 

Policy control is a key component of the intelligent control plane – which includes policy, subscriber and service controls. At Bridgewater, we think about these intelligent controls as ingredients. By combining the same ingredients in different ways, operators can choose from a cookbook of recipes to achieve several simultaneous objectives:

(1) transform networks to meet mobile data growth demands;

(2) innovate with new services to drive customer loyalty and new service revenues, while;

(3) optimising current networks to manage network growth and ease congestion.

 

Transform-innovate-optimise are fundamental to all elements within the cookbook, which embodies our comprehensive and global control plane experience.

 

Three popular recipes in our cookbook are tiered services, pre-purchase service models, and machine-to-machine (M2M).

 

Intelligent controls provide bandwidth, time or application usage metering based on real-time subscriber, device and application data. This enables operators to offer tailored service packages without touching charging systems. For example, a data plan with unlimited social networking, but with quotas for local and roaming data. Also, the well-talked about bill shock can be avoided by notifying customers before they breach usage limits. This opens up incremental revenue options, such as temporary bandwidth boost services or upgrades to a new tier.

 

Policy control can enable service providers to innovate their data services and application offers, for example allowing music or video streaming at home, but not while roaming; or allow mobile gaming-quality bandwidth in the evening, but not during the day.

 

 

While prepaid voice service models have become increasingly complex, prepaid data service models are simpler; operators typically offer fixed-rate plans based on time, bandwidth and application usage. Examples include data, application or roaming passes for a fixed period of time. Since these plans are pre-rated, they do not require an online charging or prepaid billing system. Intelligent policy controls are used to meter usage in real-time based on parameters such as location, time, application and bandwidth usage and track this usage against plan limits which are paid for in advance by the subscriber.

 

 

M2M services are experiencing a period of rapid growth and represent a promising new revenue opportunity. These services pose unique challenges in that they require full identity and application-specific policy. M2M applications demand differing levels of connectivity and have a wide variation in key parameters such as machine identifiers, security and prioritisation levels, data session durations, bandwidth requirements, latency, mobility and throughput rates.

Intelligent service and policy controls combined with machine data play a central role in addressing these challenges, managing how, when and under which circumstances devices can access the network and consume network resources. For example, public safety services benefit from priority service control that includes authentication and authorisation, as well as priority policy control, to provide dynamic bandwidth priority for CCTV cameras. On the other hand, telemetry or vending machines may require policies that permit low bandwidth requirements during the day, with a burst during off-peak hours when most data is sent. These intelligent controls play a vital role in supporting these different M2M requirements.