When MetroPCS rolls out its 4G LTE network in the second half of 2010, Bridgewater Systems will provide both the Home Subscriber Server and the Policy Controller.
As part of a multimillion-dollar contract, MetroPCS, a provider of flat-rate, prepay mobile services, will deploy Bridgewater’s HSS as a repository for subscriber and device profile and state information and to manage subscriber identities, service profiles, authentication, authorization, and quality of service in real time. It will use Bridgewater’s Policy Controller to perform the policy charging rule function (PCRF) compliant with 3GPP Release 8. The policy controller will provide smart network, application, and subscriber policies to manage mobile data growth and deliver personalized services.
Both components are part of Bridgewater’s Subscriber Data Broker, which provides a common subscriber data management platform that combines dynamic subscriber data with the tools to broker that data to multiple systems and applications to personalize services.
Helping Bridgewater win the competitive bidding process were its full compliance with 3GPP Release 8, feature functionality and Bridgewater’s current deployment of its Service Controller for authentication, authorization and accounting in MetroPCS’ 1xRTT network today.
A recent Yankee Group study revealed that adherence to the 3GPP’s policy control and charging architecture, particularly the PCRF, is increasingly important for policy management solutions. The study also said that 56 percent of operators prefer a 3GPP-compliant PCRF-based policy server versus alternatives such as deep packet inspection-based solutions that combine with either bandwidth management or service control technology.
Joanne Sternberg, director of marketing communications at Bridgewater, said the contract is significant for her company as its first major LTE deployment and that Bridgewater has more trials currently underway in Asia Pac, North America and the CALA regions.
“Our products are market ready. We meet all the standards and have all the interfaces working, which is giving us a time-to-market advantage,” she said. “Also, ours is a very full-featured HSS and one of the important differentiators is that it manages subscribes as well as devices. That becomes very important with LTE because a lot of the machine-to-machine applications are expected to take off with LTE.”
The policy controller also is dual purpose as it applies both network and subscriber policy.
It allows for more casual usage models that, prepay subscribers may want such as a roaming day pass or a pass to use an application for a few days.
Bridgewater will be fully interoperating with Ericsson’s evolved packet core components.“That will be very important for us in future deployments to have that interoperability,” Sternberg said.
MetroPCS has approximately 6 million subscribers in 21 markets across the U.S. and will be moving into LTE technology quickly.