policy control and real-time charging workshop sample

Policy Control and Charging Workshop: An Independent and Quantified Review

Policy Control and Real-Time Charging Conference

24th-25th April 2012, Amsterdam

www.alanquayle.com/blog

© 2012 Alan Quayle Business and Service Development 1

Objectives

• Provide a deep-dive quantified analysis of the PCC market status,

enabling attendees to understand what operators and suppliers are

thinking and planning.

• Learn from real-world operator deployments understanding their

challenges and opportunities.

• An aim is not to provide yet another PCC technology training session

with lots of speculation on possible ways to make money; the

vendors provide enough of them, rather a focused workshop of the

practical realities of deploying PCC.


Background Part 1 of 2 • Global broadband traffic continues to grow at 75% every 6 months, fueled by over the top video (e.g.

YouTube globally, Netflix and Hulu in the US) and the rapid growth of broadband connected

subscriptions and devices, e.g. smartphones and tablets.

• Apple sold 37.04 million iPhones and 15.43 million iPads (more than HP sold PCs) in Q4 2011.

o On the release of iPad 3 they sold 3 million devices over one weekend!

• Broadband providers face an ever widening gap between the costs of supporting the traffic load and

revenues.

• Other data points include:

o Mobile broadband subscriptions have grown around 60 percent year-over-year and have reached close to 900

million;

o The spread observed for mobile PCs is between 1 and 7GB per month. Mobile PCs have the highest average

monthly traffic volume per subscription over 3G (global average at 1-2GB), followed by tablets at 250-800MB

and smartphones at 80-600MB;

o YouTube remains the single most popular mobile Internet destination, accounting for 22% of mobile data

bandwidth usage and 52% of total video streaming;

o Skype continues as the undisputed VoIP market leader with 82% of mobile VoIP bandwidth, although its

market share has been slightly reduced by newcomers such as Viber; and

o About one third of operators have implemented some form of application-aware charging models.


Background Part 2 of 2

• It’s important to understand there are two problems being managed

through PCC

o Managing customer behavior and willingness to pay to generate the best

revenue / utilization of the fixed resources of the network (yield management)

o As well as creating new charging models and unlock new revenues (revenue

management).

• Telecoms is an old hand at yield management

o Remember those peak and off-peak charges for fixed line telephone calls, well

in the UK even in its early period from 1878 when telephony was provided by

private sector companies such as the National Telephone Company (NTC)

they had peak and off-peak charges!

o Nearly 100 years before the airlines coined the term yield management.


The Classic Telecom Mistake: Technology Focus

Yield and Revenue Management

& Cost Management

Policy Management


Structure Part 1 of 3

• 09:00 Registration

• 09:30 Market Status: What’s Driving All This Activity Around PCC?

o Examining the situations in mobile (3G, LTE and 4G), fixed and cable. For example as

mobile operators are deploying LTE, they’ve finally deployed IMS, putting in the capabilities

to support PCC so they’ve got to do something with what they’ve just bought.

• 10:15 Understanding the business basics: Yield and Revenue Management

• 10:45 Coffee Break

• 11:00 Standards and Regulation: You can never have enough of them!

o Understanding 3GPP PCC

o Then understanding all the other activities in this space: 3GPP/3GPP2, Cable Labs, Internet

Engineering Task Force (IETF), BBF, TeleManagement Forum (TMF), European

Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) Telecommunications and Internet

converged Services and Protocols for Advanced Networking (TISPAN), International

Telecommunications Union- Telecommunication (ITU-T), ATIS IPTV Interoperability

Forum (IIF), ATIS PTSC, and ATIS SON Forum

o Brief revenue of the regulatory environment



• 11:30 Solution Categories o The vendors list is long, and it’s only a partial list. Before we dive into all the vendors we’ll discuss the

different solution categories to help in mapping out the vendor landscape.

• 12:00 Vendors: Understanding who does what and why there are so many PCC Vendors. o Allot Communications, Alcatel Lucent, Alepo, Amdocs, Aptilo, BroadHop, ByteMobile, Cisco, Comarch,

Comptel, Comverse, Convergys, CSGi, DigitalRoute, Ericsson (Telcordia), FTS, HP, Huawei, IBM, Intec,

Matrixx, Microsoft, Nokia Siemens Networks, OpenCloud, Openet, Oracle, Orga Systems, Qosmos, Redknee,

Sandvine, SAP, Tango Telecom, Tekelec, Vedicis, Volubill + plus many more including the Sis

o Understanding the differences between the vendors’ PCC solutions, architectural strategies, integration with

billing

• 13:00 Lunch

• 14:30 Case Studies o Independent review of case studies from America, Europe and APAC, across developed and developing

markets, across mobile, fixed and cable.

o Examining the business case for an integrated policy and charging control (PCC) solution

o Subscriber profiling in the PCC architecture current limitations and ways forward.

o How to support various mobile radio interfaces (2G, 3G, 4G, WIMAX, WIFI) and PCC solutions that can help

facilitate offload

o Managing device proliferation: implementing policy solutions based on device types, e.g. smartphones vs.

mobile broadband



• 15:30 Quick Coffee Break

• 15:30 Market Survey

o What are operators actually doing?

o What are the results so far?

o What have they learned?

o What are their plans?

• 16:00 End Customer Survey

o What do real customers think of some of the new charging models?

o Survey covers North America and Europe across the consumer segment.

• 16:30 Reality Set, Recommendations and Discussion

• 17:00 End of Workshop


Alan Quayle

• 22 years of experience in the telecommunication industry, focused on developing

profitable new businesses in service providers, suppliers and start-ups.

• Customers include

o Operators such as AT&T, BT, Charter, Etisalat, M1, O2, Rogers, Swisscom, T-Mobile,

Telstra, Time Warner Cable, Verizon and Vodafone;

o Suppliers such as Adobe, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia Siemens Networks,

and Oracle; and

o Innovative start-ups such as Apigee, AppTrigger (sold to Metaswitch), Camiant (sold to

Tekelec), OpenCloud, and Voxeo.

• Work with the developer community and on the board of developers such as

GotoCamera, hSenid Mobile, as well as suppliers such as Sigma Systems.

• Weblog www.alanquayle.com/blog

• Linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/in/alanquayle


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http://www.linkedin.com/in/alanquayle

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A Thank You to Those helping me Put this Course Together

• In putting this workshop together I’d like to thank the following

suppliers for their time, openness, willingness to review, and provide

material to ensure this workshop is up-to-the-minute.

o And especially for not requiring any editorial control over the content or

my views expressed in this material (in reverse alphabetically order).

• Tekelec (Camiant)

• Redknee

• Oracle

• OpenCloud

• NSN


Some Zen Guidance as we Review this Complex Emerging Landscape

1. Avoid black and white thinking. Its all shades of gray, nothing is

absolutely right, just more appropriate today.

o In the future, who knows? We suck at predicting the future.

2. There is no ‘target’ architecture.

o Its going to evolve before you get there.

3. Focus your decisions on what you need to do this year, with a eye to

the broader trends (see point 2).

o Regardless of what you deploy, its going to need to evolve.

4. Do not base your selection decisions solely on the broader trends,

as you’ll compromise this year’s needs (see point 2).


Health Warning about Policy and Engineers

• Engineers love configuration, control, sophistication, complex elegance and tend

to be mildly autistic

• Policy allows engineers to ‘go to town’ on configuration, control, sophistication,

and complexity

o I’ve been here over one decade ago with availability management

• However, engineers do not understand customers – see ‘mildly autistic’

• Just because something is possible doesn’t mean you should do it!

• The business people need to regain control of policy management by defining

their requirements for yield and revenue management. The Network guys

should focus on using it to control the costs of running the network.
