What’s Your Policy?

Think policy management and you’re likely to think of bandwidth control. Think of bandwidth control and you’re likely to think of the Comcast case. And as a user you’re likely to think about it negatively. You have to get over that.

Policy management is, and should be viewed as, a positive feature for ensuring customer satisfaction.

In a study issued in September by Yankee Group called “The Policy of Protecting Customer Experience,” by senior analyst David Vorhaus and vice president Ari Banerjee, the two urged established operators to reconsider how they manage network traffic and move beyond flat-rate service models to tired and personalized services. It is clear by some of the news recently from AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and others that they are seriously doing so.

And by doing so, mobile operators in particular could solve some of their issues around bandwidth constraints. If Cisco Systems’ Visual Networking Index is correct and mobile data traffic grows at a compound annual growth rate of 131 percent from 33.1 terabytes per month in 2008 to 2,184.2 terabytes by 2013, the operators’ issues can’t be ignored.

Yankee Group surveyed networking and marketing executives from 61 GSM/UMTS operators in Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East to understand how they viewed their bandwidth management practices and what they were thinking along the lines of policy management. They found that operators wanted more intelligence in their bandwidth management tools, that they support bandwidth caps done properly (with the right levels of targeting and personalization), that quality and customer satisfaction were their primary goals and that adhering to 3GPP’s Policy Control and Charging (PCC) architecture, particularly the Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF) was the best approach to achieving these goals.

While operators still hesitate to introduce differentiated pricing models, they are getting closer to admitting they don’t have many other options given the competitive condition on the ground and the potential cost benefit to the better allocation of network resources that tiered pricing and bandwidth control can offer. However, as necessary and logical cost control might be, operators will have a hard time pushing bandwidth control in that manner. They and their customers are both better served by focusing on the other capabilities of policy and bandwidth controls – their ability to create differentiated services and to interact with the business support system (BSS) infrastructure to make them profitable.