By
Gareth Senior
Over the years, Communications Service Providers (CSPs) have come to expect a steady growth in services and sales—and a corresponding growth in revenue. They have sold more phones and taken on more subscribers; use of services increased, and revenues and profits subsequently grew. But, now the spell seems to have been broken. In mature markets, it’s getting harder and more expensive to add new subscribers. Furthermore, while broadband traffic has surged, and costs to add capacity to meet that demand have also rapidly grown, revenues have not increased proportionally. This is clearly an unsustainable situation, forcing many CSPs to look to ways of managing and monetizing their broadband offerings, with policy control as one tool to achieve that.
CSPs now have to manage a fine balancing act between keeping customers happy (or indeed just keeping them) and extracting more money from them, while at the same time managing resources and capacity. Ideally, operators would like to keep customers happy enough for them to spend as much as possible, while using as few resources (such as bandwidth) as possible. Customers, on the other hand, want total satisfaction, using as much capacity as possible, and paying as little as possible.
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CSPs now have to manage a fine balancing act between keeping customers happy and extracting more money from them. |
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it is about managing the access to services by subscribers. Historically, policy control can be thought of as having two very separate origins. In the fixed environment, policy control was about network resources allocation. An early example of policy control in action is the use of Class of Services (CoS) in MPLS networks to differentiate the delivery of enterprise services. In the mobile space, policy control was about charging—for example, taking action when a pre-paid customer’s credit runs out.
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Until quite recently, the main tool at the disposal of CSPs to balance those potentially conflicting requirements was billing or charging. Price for services was used to optimise revenue and customer satisfaction, as well as limit access to resources—premium price for premium services. But now, policy control adds a new formidable tool to the armoury of CSPs, allowing them to not only make better use of available resources, but also offer more personalized services to their customers, with the hope of generating more revenue.
Policy control has a multitude of definitions, objectives and solutions, but broadly speaking,
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Now, with the advent of the broadband era, policy control is stepping out of those silos and coming of age. Most importantly, policy control is shifting from a network-centric and defensive approach to one that puts the customer experience first.
To achieve this, policy control has become far more dynamic, taking a multitude of factors into account—in real time. These factors include not only the type of service but also the current network conditions, the user’s profile (e.g. business or consumer, gold or standard, high or low spender), the type of device being used to access the service and even the location of the user.
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