By
David Chambers
It’s not the same as voice
We have seen the enormous growth and takeup in unlimited voice plans in recent years. Just like all-you-can-eat diners, these plans are naturally limited by how much any individual can consume in the time available. Most people simply aren’t able to talk for more than a certain amount of time per day, and even if they did, they might run out of friends to call if they repeated this too often.
On the other hand, mobile data devices can continue to communicate and eat up bandwidth even during our sleep. It is not uncommon for email capable smartphones to check for mail every hour or more. More complex features such as streaming music (Spotify), video, chat and games encourage ever-higher traffic throughput.
This has led to consumption of several hundred megabytes per device by many high end smartphones, with Clearwire predicting as much as 14GB/month for mobile users in the coming decade.
Setting customer’s expectations
Unlimited data usage for a monthly fee could become a millstone around service provider’s necks. Many unlimited packages are starting to introduce monthly “fair-usage” caps after which service is either terminated, charged at additional cost, or severely throttled.
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Unlimited data usage for a monthly fee could become a millstone around service provider’s necks. |
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Delivering the customer experience
In order to match these growing customer expectations with resource contrained networks, service providers are turning to engineering solutions to shape and mould their customers’ data experience.
Managing data traffic networks today is mostly about prioritising individual packets as they make their way through the network. There are two main control points:
- Access network, near to the point of customer delivery
- Centrally, near to the main offload or interworking points
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Service providers’ advertising often includes estimates of the large number of emails, webpages or video that their usage caps relate to. The trouble is that customers still find this difficult to estimate or compare with their expected behavior. “Bill shock” still occurs when overage is billed for, resulting in poor customer satisfaction. Many customers have little idea how much data they actually consume.
For example, the massive 5GB-per-month cap on Sprint’s latest phone plan is still seen as offputting to some potential customers, despite typical traffic usage being less than 10% of this figure.
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These categories are complementary – both techniques are required – but in themselves do not tell the full story.
Access Network
Fixed broadband networks such as DSL apply traffic prioritization in the DSLAM where individual customer lines are concentrated before being routed through the core network. Contention ratios of 20:1 to 50:1 are common, with most customers being treated on the same “best effort” basis. Service providers may offer
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