Martin Morgan, VP of Marketing at Openet, the global leader in the supply of real-time BSS (business support systems), in conjunction with the ongoing Policy Control event taking place this week in Berlin, shares with PCC Mobile Broadband key trends in the Policy Control market for this year. The Policy Control segment in recent years is becoming an increasingly critical component within the Mobile Network IT systems as mobile services continue to evolve rapidly to cover more innovative service bundles, more connected screens and more digital content. This in turn sees major changes within this segment as it responds to these demands as well as the overall advancements in the IT space. Martin's top 5 trends for the segment are:
1. Virtualization - We’re seeing the IT-isation of networks and the virtualization of network functions but in order for the benefits delivered by NFV to be realised by the business side of an operator, then the BSS that enables service development, packaging, monetization and increasingly offers marketing, needs to be virtualized as well. This is now starting to happen and policy management is at the forefront of BSS systems that are being virtualized. When one considers the origins of policy as a network control tool then this seems the obvious place to start virtualizing BSS. With policy no longer just a network control tool but also a marketing enablement and service creation system, one of the main benefits that operators are citing for the virtualization of policy and BSS is faster time to market. The reduced Opex and Capex costs are still hugely important, but the cost that operators are increasingly looking at is the opportunity cost of not having new products and services to market quickly enough.
2. Policy as a Service Creation System - As operators become increasingly creative in defining offer bundles, with data tiers, speed tiers, social media offers, content offers and data roaming offers, policy systems are being used to control and manage network access and ensure the customer network experience. By having policy as a central element in service creation, operators can leverage many characteristics of policy management and apply these to their services. These include real-time, contextual and personalized services. A simple example is a parental control offer provided as an add-on to a family shared data plan. Defining who can access what, and at what time and where is controlled by policy. At its heart, it’s still network control, but it’s being used as a marketing offer to sell additional services and differentiate an operator when selling to families.
Martin Morgan,
VP Marketing,
Openet
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3. Policy Data and Real-time Analytics – Real-time xDRs that are used by policy are now being used increasingly in real-time analytics. Traditionally, data warehouses used batch mediated usage records, and while this will continue to be used to build up historical customer insights (e.g. churn propensity score, life time value, net promotor score, etc), there is an increasing use of real-time analytics combined with historical analytics to form the basis of automated decision making and actions. These could be selling a heavy Facebook user a low cost Facebook pass as they’ve stopped using Facebook (and other services) as they’ve reached their data cap and the much touted example of data roaming service passes. The main thing is that operators are now using real-time data, combined with historical data to drive contextually aware sales, marketing and customer care decisions and actions.
4. Policy as a 'Traffic Offload Decisioning Engine’ – Wi-fi is now a hot topic with operators. The ability to carry traffic over unlicensed spectrum, while is financially appealing, also has the potential for very negative customer experience if the wrong traffic, from the wrong customer is offloaded onto a congested wi-fi network. Using policy management along with ANDSF (Access Network Detection and Selection Function) can add intelligence to offload decisions. Using the rules functions in policy systems, operators can decide which traffic is offloaded to Wi-fi and under what circumstances. This will provide a control factor and ensure that the most optimal network is used to carry the correct traffic – at the correct cost and delivering the correct customer and network experience.
5. VoLTE – We’re starting to see some momentum with VoLTE roll outs in 2015. One of the main differences between CS voice and VoLTE is that policy is needed as the fundamental building block of VoLTE services. The reason – VoLTE is being marketed as hi-def voice. The hi-def service quality needs to be delivered on every call, every time. Doing this requires pro-active QoS measures enabled by policy management. VoLTE may also see some policy systems struggle, as with VoLTE, the amount of signalling on the control plane will increase to new levels. Each time a phone connects to the network, additional signalling is required on top of the signalling required to set up a data connection. Whenever a phone call is made, or modified (e.g. by putting someone on hold), significant signalling must take place to ensure that the subscriber gets the correct bandwidth and quality of service. It will be interesting to see if some older policy management systems can scale up to handle the signalling traffic that VoLTE will generate.
