Why Combine Policy Control & Charging?

As communication services becoming more numerous, varied, and complex due to convergence and increased market competition, network providers are looking for clever ways to control the behavior of services and subscribers on their networks in order to guarantee quality of service, subscriber satisfaction, and revenue from their new services.
Mark DelSesto, Director of Product Management at Camiant and David McNierney, VP Market Development from Highdeal Inc. examine how policy control is maturing to meet these demands and the natural and symbiotic relationship that is emerging between policy and charging.

Mark DelSesto, Director of Product Management, Camiant

David McNierney, VP Market Development, Highdeal Inc

Transaction Reporter: What is policy control and why is it important to service providers?

Mark DelSesto: Policy control is really an old topic that is receiving increased attention. Policy control enables network service providers to finely control their access network. It allows operators to decide what a subscriber can do, what applications he is enabled to use, and what content he is able to access, as well as how the service is delivered. With the right policy rules engine, service providers can finely control and marry services with the capabilities of their access network.

TR: Why is policy control receiving increased attention?

Mark: Most operators already have policy in their network today, such as static tiering with a premium or basic service level for subscribers or they have local rules on routers to deal with congestion. But the policy is often decentralized and spread out over all sorts of different components throughout their network. It is becoming increasingly difficult and complex to manage, especially given increased competition and the overall move towards convergence.
With more and more ways to access the Internet, operators must figure out how to differentiate their offerings. One way is to finely tune and control the QoS parameters for the delivery of individual subscriber’s services. And as operators expand into additional access networks to provide triple-play or quad-play type services, having local policy spread across their network silos no longer works. They need a centralized policy point that is attached to the individual subscriber and can be deployed across any access network that a subscriber roams to.
In addition, a very specific issue that is driving policy control is the move to VoIP. When subscribers had circuit based voice telephony, quality of service (QoS) was built in and guaranteed. As providers launch VoIP, that quality of service piece is no longer just built in; it has to be added. Operators are looking to policy control to make sure they can deliver their VoIP services with the same quality as circuit based calling.

David McNierney: Operators are talking about providing 160 MB bandwidth speeds, but really the more broadband that is available, the greater the delta between the heavy bandwidth users and the light bandwidth user. The more it increases, the less people will be willing to cross subsidize one another and the more likely operators will have to provide differentiated pricing for the higher speed connections.

Mark: Exactly, no matter how much the size of the access network increases, there is always going to be congestion. Applications will continue to show up and take advantage of the increase in bandwidth and at some point you have to prioritize the traffic. Network providers have to be able to handle congestion and make decisions on what traffic gets precedence.

TR: What effect is the Net Neutrality debate having on policy control and is Net Neutrality compatible with delivering differentiated QoS?

David: Net Neutrality is mostly centered on residential broadband networks. The basic argument is that broadband networks should be neutral and not restrict specific “over the top” applications or modes of communication allowed over the internet.

Mark: Overall Net Neutrality is an excellent debate and it is something that needs to be discussed. With VoIP calls, obviously you need some way to make sure that emergency calls go through, that traffic needs to be protected and brought through the network on an expedited basis. Having these calls mixed in with all the other traffic with no differentiation, gets you into trouble.
From Camiant’s prospective, we compare it to someone mailing a letter. When you mail a letter, you can select the standard postal service and it gets delivered in 2-3 days, you can select express mail and for a little more it gets there in 2 days, or you can do something with FedEx or DHL and it gets there overnight. We are looking at an identical paradigm with offering differentiated quality to subscribers to give subscribers the option to pay for the access they need.

TR: Why would service providers want to bring together charging and policy control?

Mark: It is really a natural marriage. Once you have policy controlling what the subscriber can access, how they access it, when they access it, and where they access it, you add the charging piece and it really rounds out and completes the solution; giving subscribers the ability and choice in real-time to decide if they want to download a piece of content or access a service from a certain location and be billed for it later. We see this as a natural marriage; enabling operators to deploy solutions quickly and efficiently.

David: We talked about the angle of Net Neutrality and how do you monetize applications crossing the network. An important aspect of this is when you look at the monetization of network services from a network operator point of view, what will it look like in the future? Linking the charging piece gives service providers the option of figuring out are they a full service provider owning the customer relationship, are they charging for all their services, and are they charging potentially third party partners for over the top applications. Combining policy control with charging empowers network operators to figure out how they can leverage and monetize QoS as effectively as possible.

Mark: An example: right now, everyone is flocking towards digital cameras and many people are uploading their photos. This is leading to network intensive events and a subscriber can spend over an hour on their internet connection uploading photos. It is not beneficial for the subscribers’ experience and it is bad for the network. We are looking at dynamically increasing the uplink speed so those photos can get on and off the network very quickly, bettering the user’s experience and helping the network. Subscribers would have the level of control where they could go in, pay an extra dollar or two, and finish the upload very quickly.

David: Another angle in tying policy control to charging is the notion of third party sponsorships. Typically if the end user wants to use a heavier bandwidth application or play the online game with a lower latency connection, the user will pay the extra fee, but there is also the move towards third parties sponsoring for the extra fees, of course in exchange for something such as watching an embedded advertisement. There exists this possibility emerging of not just charging the end user subscriber, but charging a third party for that extra or prioritized bandwidth.

Mark: For example, one of the applications we have been involved with is an online gaming application. Gamers are looking for an enhanced experience and we are working with an operator to provide a tiered service solution that provides a lower latency connection. Gaming is not very bandwidth intensive, but it is very latency sensitive. We are working to deploy a service that as soon as we identify the gamer we can offer him or her a lower latency connect, improving his or her gaming experience and giving him or her an advantage while playing. The network provider can charge for this service on a monthly basis, or the gamer can be given the option when he or she begins the game to pay an extra fee to enhance this gaming experience, or a third party can cover the fee in exchange for the gamer watching a short advertisement before he or she begins playing.

TR: Can you describe the Camiant and Highdeal relationship and comment on the key benefits of the partnership?

David: We are really excited to be partnering with Camiant, an industry recognized policy control leader. We see an endless number of places where our joint solution can bring enormous benefits for both subscribers and network providers.

Mark: Overall the Camiant relationship with Highdeal has been superb. From working out some of the technical nuances of how to put the solutions together right down to the documentation that has been provided to us, the level of support we have received has been phenomenal. As David mentions, there is any number of places where policy combined with charging can be deployed and we are looking together at a number of opportunities and applications across multiple access networks.
I think the key benefit to our solution is really the complimentary nature of policy and charging. By combining the power of the Highdeal rating engine with the Camiant policy rules engine, we are providing a powerful tool that rather than being application specific can be applied across the entire network to ensure flawless performance and real-time charging for any application and service.