OSS/BSS Special Focus - A question of policy
Aligning business strategies with customer-focused policy management is creating a headache,
but also an opportunity, for service providers and operators. Industry players from across the policy management sector tell Keith Dyer how operators can use their tools to drive profitable, consumer-driven, services
The impact of the drive by fixed and mobile operators to design services targeted at highly specific customer segments is now being seen across the industry. Operators and service providers that are providing businesses and consumers with advanced customer offers are facing a challenge on two fronts according to Gareth Senior, Chief Technology Officer, Comptel Corporation. Senior says, "The first challenge is managing the more personalised nature of these lifestyle services, which might involve everything from network access, service definition and payment plans to the type of media and entertainment content involved. The second is managing the heavy burden these lifestyle services place on network capacity and the overall management of bandwidth."
This is a double whammy of complexity and volume that could potentially have a detrimental effect on the ability of service providers to keep customers happy without incurring excess costs either by adding network capacity, or by running to keep up with ever more complicated service and tariff plans.
Tug-of-War
Senior says, "Today's traffic volumes and the long-term implications are forcing operators to change their business strategies and take a step into the flexible world of policy-enabled customer satisfaction management."
Senior points out that it's no surprise that businesses and consumers want to pay as little as possible to get as many minutes of use, or as much bandwidth and download volume as they can-expecting total customer satisfaction. Meanwhile, operators would ideally like to capture the most revenue to maximise profitability, while keeping their customers happy enough. Service providers want customers to stay and spend more, while they deliver as little network capacity as possible, to keep costs under control. Ultimately there needs to be a balance between the aspirations of customers and the business realities faced by all network operators, rather than a tug of war.
To support increasing traffic volumes and provide network connectivity at an acceptable level of service quality, Senior says that operators have three choices-build additional network capacity, push traffic to other operators' networks or manage their available assets more effectively.
It is the last option that has seen the growth in scale and scope of the policy management tools and solutions on the market.
Tal Rotem, director of product management, Comverse, says that Comverse has had to respond to increased operator demand with an ultra-high capacity configuration for its Mobile Internet HUB platform to enable operators to manage booming mobile data traffic growth without the immediate need to build out network infrastructure.
Earlier this year, Comverse announced it had integrated DPI capabilities within its MIH product. In April, it then said that its MIH now has a throughput of up to 40 gigabits per second, giving it the ability to handle tens of thousands of web transactions per second, or hundreds of thousands of multiple data streams. Rotem says that this is direct result of Tier One operator demands.
"We have integrated DPI, charging, and policy enforcement and management capabilities under the MIH, to enable operators to enforce different actions as well as offer bandwidth shaping, charging notifications of limits reached, or personalise access to certain websites, for example," Rotem says.
The demand for operators to have solutions that enable them to carry out enforcement and management at high volumes was also the driving rationale behind a recent industry partnership between Allot Communications and 724 Solutions. The companies say that building a joint solution and interoperability use cases was driven by customer requirements to enable mobile operators to provide high quality tiered and premium subscriber services that better align with subscriber usage and mobile internet plans.
More than the PCRF
Based on 3GPP policy enforcement standards for mobile networks, the solution combines Allot's precise application identification and Policy and Charging Enforcement Function (PCEF) capabilities with 724's Seamless Access, and the joint approach is designed to allow mobile operators to enhance user experience, better manage available bandwidth and fair use policies, and identify additional revenue opportunities within their mobile broadband services. The joint solution is also designed to enable tailoring service packages based on a variety of parameters including session events, subscriber profile, quota, network resource availability, time of day and subscriber location.
"As mobile operators seek ways to improve the profitability of mobile broadband services, it is essential for them to have the insight to manage both network costs and user experience, as well as having the ability to identify real-time opportunities for revenue generation at the precise moment of opportunity," says John Sims, Chief Executive Officer of 724 Solutions.
Camiant, which is a leading player in the PCRF space, is another company that has seen the impact of real operator demands in this market. Verizon Wireless recently selected Camiant's Multimedia Policy Engine (MPE) as the Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF) for its LTE network.
Camiant's MPE will perform policy control in the LTE network for Internet Data, IMS- and non-IMS-based services. In addition, Camiant's MPE will also be the PCRF for all IMS based services over the existing 3G network.
"Policy control is vital for us to successfully harness LTE and deliver services that meet the growing needs of our subscribers and their applications," says Tony Melone, chief technical officer for Verizon Wireless.
Camiant too has seen the need to interoperate with other players in the market to meet operator demands - in its case teaming its PCRF with BlueSlice Networks' subscriber data management capabilities.
Camiant and Blueslice share a view that the "subscriber and resource control intelligence" layer should be centralised to avoid the creation of new silos in the network. This approach lays the groundwork for a next-generation market offering that consists of an independent policy control management solution closely networked with a consolidated subscriber data management solution.
"With the rapid uptake of technologies like LTE - it has become critical for network operators to prevent the proliferation of subscriber data silos," said Frederic Bastien, Vice President of Products, Blueslice Networks. "Working closely with the policy control market leader, Camiant, provides Blueslice with a compelling best-in-class policy front-end that is pre-integrated with the Blueslice data repository."
Tacitly agreeing with the outlook that policy is about more than the PCRF, Norm Kincl of NGOSS Architecture, HP Communications & Media Solutions, is of the opinion that "the [way we] view of policy needs to expand beyond things like the PCRF defined by 3GPP."
"Policy needs to be a formal articulation of how particular customers should be handled" he says. "For OSS, policy will increasingly become important as OSS actions are further automated. Whether it is how you deal with an activation failure or what happens when a service level is violated, the actions need to be driven by the policy that applies to the customer involved."
Kincl's point is, perhaps, that a policy will only be as good as the data and information upon which it relies.
"OSS can also contribute to policy in two ways," Kincl continues. "First, OSS systems collect metrics and KPIs that can be used to determine policy decisions. Second, OSS systems can be used to implement some policy decisions (for example, disable a service that is being used in a fraudulent manner).
"Finally, policy is one of those areas where network and OSS functions converge. One of the uses of a PCC is to provide traffic management, optimising the utilisation of the network. While this can be thought of a network function since it is happening with network systems, it is something that had been provided as an operations function. As the tasks that used to be in operations push into the network, the role of operations will change. Rather than implementing the policies, the OSS systems will need to monitor the services to ensure that the policies are having the desired effect."
It is in the combination of policy management and control with other real time elements that will enable operators to provide personalized services in a way that is fair for all, says Comverse's Rotem.
"When our customers take the MIH that means the user is exposed to a wide range of services because the MIH offers traffic management, charging, optimisation, access control and many other capabilities due to the fact that we have the core DPI layer that makes the actual services on the pipe visible to the MIH," he says.
Comptel's Senior agrees that policy management has now become about a combination of elements.
"Effective, customer-focused policy management should involve three components," he says. "A customer usage identification and data collection function, to understand what types of services customers are using; a policy definition and management function, to enable both operators and customers to customise how a pricing package is consumed or a service is accessed; and a policy enforcement function, to carry out defined policy rules. Added to this, over the past two years a small but growing number of service providers from across the globe initiated business strategies involving policy management integrated with real-time rating and charging.
"Today, bringing these components together to address customer-focused policy requirements is largely new for the industry, but essential for meeting customer concerns and for addressing long-term business objectives."
Share this article with others
Post to del.icio.us
Printed from http://www.eurocomms.com/features/113733/OSS%252FBSS_Special_Focus_-_A_question_of_policy.html
Comment on this article
Skip to comments
We encourage users to analyse, comment on and even challenge European Communications's articles, including the one above - 'OSS/BSS Special Focus - A question of policy'
User reviews and comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site.
Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. We will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site.