By Lucas Skoczkowski

Today’s banquet of mobile broadband capabilities offered to customers is not only challenging service providers’ bandwidth management, it is also putting increasing pressure on CSPs on how they can monetize these services. When we consider that watching an hour of YouTube clips is the equivalent in terms of data usage to sending a million text messages. Downloading a movie over a mobile device equates to almost 400,000 e-mails. Yet consumers, under today’s business models, are lulled into thinking that as long as they purchase and subscribe, there is little they cannot do on their mobile devices.

The days of light users compensating for heavy users in the flat-rate model are gone and now operators are in a race against time to overturn this premise as projections show mobile data to increase five-fold in as little as a year’s time.

When considering this problem, one must ask: When subscribers overburden networks, or go over their minutes and incur penalties, is it because they don’t understand their voice and data plans, or is it because

service providers don’t understand their subscribers? With anti-bill shock legislation worldwide, voice ARPU dwindling, and competition among carriers ever-increasing, the answer is clear: It is incumbent upon service providers to take charge of their policy control now if they want to retain and add customers, increase revenue, and avoid customer bill shock.

To some, policy management means policing their networks and dissuading the heaviest users – even going to the lengths of degrading service and sending out warning notices. With tiered pricing and prepaid plans growing in popularity, policy control is shedding its reputation as a punitive measure. Now, service providers can see it as a means to generate revenue and ensure that the subscriber receive the highest quality of service, partly because of transparency in billing, but largely because of increased communication.

Service providers want to provide service, not limit it. They should support new pricing models that encourage increased usage, and they can do it while boosting ARPU and protecting the network from capacity strains.

When integrated to the charging layer, policy control helps to give the subscriber more. It can track when subscriber data use goes beyond a certain threshold so the operator can send balance notification alerts – and help avoid the dreaded bill shock. User

In a recent survey, Heavy Reading predicts service providers will add a new policy every six-to-eight weeks. Polices set around service delivery will impact various triggers, including location, network type, device, the subscriber’s tier, URL, type of application, time of day, subscriber preferences, etc. The list is practically endless, and it will bring greater customer loyalty and more revenue to the service provider.

As telecoms adapt in this era of transformation, policy control will also become more interdependent with rating and charging—all in real time, providing ways to really know each subscriber individually enough for it really matter.

In fact, the survey also states that, “…service providers need to use policy in a new way and work to integrate it with back-office operations and support systems and with other functions such as charging.”

It is important to point out that a large reason real-time rating, charging, and policy solutions offer so much transformation is because of the two-way relationship between the operator and customer they enable. Currently, the majority of the network elements in a service provider’s environment still manage the lifecycle of a service as an entity. The systems handle batch-billing, but not rating or analysis of consumed services, nor can they intelligently analyze subscriber habits.