Network congestion issues will only get more acute for service providers as customers continue to take them up on new bandwidth-hungry devices and applications. To help manage their bandwidth in a way that focuses not just in the network but on customer-driven policy capabilities, Telcordia today launched a new product: Bandwidth Manager.
Telcordia’s angle is to address exponential network demand with personalized bandwidth management. The second-generation, first-time-to-market solution is a software-based, standards-compliant, converged Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF.) It leverages Telcordia’s real-time rating and charging solutions to enforce bandwidth and charging-related rules.
“It helps [service providers] move away form worrying about what they’re doing to the network with all this data and toward a new business that involves the customer and makes more money for the business,” said Tom Forsyth, director of service delivery solutions marketing at Telcordia.
Sheryl Kingstone, director of the Enterprise Research group at Yankee Group, said her company’s survey data shows that between 50 percent and 60 percent of respondents are likely or highly likely to purchase a smartphone, thereby creating exponential demand for mobile broadband. She added that Telcordia’s Bandwidth Manager can help service providers find more creative ways to price their data and application services. “Now operators can better monetize their network through specialized pricing plans coupled with managed bandwidth consumption to provide differentiated customer experience,” she said.
The solution is designed to answer the call for capabilities around customized services and tiered pricing plans based on network access type, time of day, equipment type and/or, network congestion status.
Pat McCarthy, vice president of Service Delivery Solutions Marketing at Telcordia, said it is all about the network team allowing the business and marketing teams to leverage assets that help differentiate their offer. “Customers gain the benefits of only paying for the service they need, while CSPs can manage their network expenditures more effectively and in line with the value delivered to their customers,” he said.
Bandwidth Manager supports any access type across multiple networks including 3G, 4G and DSL and helps ensure subscribers get service levels they require for bandwidth-sensitive application such as video streaming, IPTV and VoIP. Telcordia says that capex can be reduced by up to 25 percent by optimizing the management of bandwidth and gives other reasons for shoring up bandwidth management capabilities in its latest whitepaper called "Mobile Broadband: Surf the Broadband Wave with a Customer-Centric Business Model."
“It leverages existing large scale subscriber databases and proven technologies we have in the real-time charging market to support the needs of policy control,” McCarthy said.
