From Gatekeeper to Gold: Leveraging Policy 2.0

By: Jesse Cryderman

Policy management is not immediately an attractive phrase, and certainly not a self-apparent creator of value. I'd imagine enrollment in a college class entitled “Policy 2.0” would trend a tad lower than “Sexuality in New Media.” It's easy to see why.

The etymology of the word policy leads us to the Greek word polis, or city-state, from which words like politics and police also derive. Policing and politicizing conversation is not exactly desirable dinner table etiquette. However, in ancient Greek, polis described not just the buildings and space occupied by a city, but its citizenry and society as well.

What does this have to do with telecom?

In a sense, the definition of policy in telecommunications is trending away from “police,” and more toward its original meaning. In the past, data monitoring was like policing—a reactive affair. Similarly, policy management solutions were reactive—they were on-off gatekeepers, punitive controllers, policeman with batons. More than simply outlining and enforcing a perimeter boundary, policy today reflects and affects the totality of a subscriber ecosystem.



Policy systems that were once viewed as merely a gatekeeper or tollbooth operator have evolved, and can be used to deploy new services, improve loyalty, and maximize network asset utilization. Additionally, policy control and analytics can be leveraged to create and extract value from many new service environments, including over-the-top (OTT), machine to machine (M2M), and the Cloud.

Policy 1.0

The first policy management solutions were based on the market and service dynamics of the past. Networks weren't very smart, or aware, and service offerings were relatively static. In the early days of subscriber service management, policy management was primarily deployed to control broadband consumption by the cable industry. “Initially, policy was a defensive technology designed to enable bandwidth and usage caps and tiers,” explained Kishen Mangat, vice president, Solutions at BroadHop, Inc. “It focused primarily on managing network capacity and utilization. We refer to this era as Policy 1.0.”