By: Becky Bracken

Whether carriers are facing a crush of Netflix video traffic or just trying to get the most bang for their pipe buck, bandwidth management has evolved into a complicated business proposition. And because the IT infrastructure has gotten so much more sophisticated, so too have operator expectations for what’s possible. 

“The market is maturing, both from a vendor and an operator point of view,” says Jonathon Gordon, director of marketing at Allot Communications. “We are seeing more strategic thinking from operators with regards to their bandwidth management. This is resulting in more complex use cases, which in turn makes life much more interesting for the vendors too. We are in a better position today to offer providers a bevy of off-the-shelf solutions to optimize their traffic delivery and allow them to shift their focus from the network back to the customer.” 

It’s also a problem that isn’t just going to go away. Services, devices, individual consumers, and even machines themselves are all vying for their slice of bandwidth, and the more control operators have to make available capacity dance on the head of a pin, the more revenue they can eventually carve out of their business. 

“We definitely see an uptick in the need for bandwidth management — and the willingness to implement it,” says Anand Gonuguntla, president and CEO of Centina Systems. “Every operator we talk to wants to do something about it. And despite the economy, they haven’t totally capped spending. The belts may have been tightened in the last five years, but bandwidth and service management is one area where investments are continuing.”

But where is smart money being spent? Bandwidth management is a broad term that, depending on the context, means vastly different things. There are, however, a few trends worth following into 2013. Here are a few of the best examples. 

Traffic flow must support new data pricing

Consumers are accustomed to tailoring their entire smartphone experience around their own personal preferences, and that has extended to a widespread desire for customers to be able to control and tailor their pricing plans accordingly. Any traffic management solution must be able to handle these dynamic pricing models. 

“Traffic management today is as much about supporting new data-pricing approaches as it is about handling traffic flows,” says Susan Welsh de Grimaldo, director of Mobile Broadband Opportunities for Strategy Analytics. “In the highly competitive mobile broadband era, operators with innovative pricing models that engage customers and increase quality of experience (QoE) will win.”

Recent Strategy Analytics surveys show that a whopping 60 percent of US smartphone owners want to customize their mobile service plans instead of having a set list of plans from which to choose. According to the surveys, interest in customized plans has also reached 56 percent in the UK and 72 percent in China. 

The entire experience is being driven by the customer. Quality of experience often simply comes down to how flexible operators can be in order to meet evolving consumer demands for bandwidth.