Mobile Personalization

As high-bandwidth data services proliferate, delivering personalized mobile experiences will become more important to operators that want a bigger slice of consumer-usage revenues.

 

Armed with mobile personalization provider Bridgewater’s latest policy control technology enhancements, operators will have an easier time doing everything from providing heavy mobile video users with guaranteed quality of service for a monthly fee to offering casual users applications on-demand. 

 

On Monday, Ottawa-based Bridgewater Systems (News - Alert) announced the availability of enhancements to the Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF)-compliant Bridgewater Policy Controller for HSPA and LTE networks. According to Bridgewater, this is the first PCRF to support new requirements defined in Release 9 standards of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP).

 

“New mobile data services will be based on subscribers’ usage, much like water and electricity are today,” David Sharpley (News - Alert), senior vice president, Bridgewater Systems, told TMCnet. “As the first to comply with new PCRF Release 9 standards, the Bridgewater Policy Controller allows operators to deliver personalized services based on usage.”

 

Operators can use this enhanced policy control product to do a number of things, including:

 

* Managing use of high-bandwidth services by setting up a plan for users to choose how much bandwidth to allocate to different applications and monitor application usage in real time to prevent bill shock;

*Alleviating network congestion by applying “Smart Caps” and metering to adjust usage levels based on real-time factors such as level of congestion and time of day, or a subscriber’s data consumption or roaming status;

* Significantly reducing costs by adopting a more efficient way of enforcing policies and metering subscriber usage that does not require expensive Online Charging Systems or upgrades to existing charging systems.

A recent Yankee Group (News - Alert) survey of executives from 61 GSM/HSPA operators in Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East revealed that the majority preferred a PCRF standards based policy solution.

The ability to charge subscribers based on their volume of usage for individual applications such as video, peer-to-peer, and voice over IP was ranked high in importance. The same survey concluded that allowing subscribers to individually set and modify their own service preferences and plans including managing usage, and setting limits per application or while roaming was a strong value proposition.

“When going to market with new services or service models, operators should first look at policy control tools that safeguard the customer experience,” said Ari Banerjee (News - Alert), vice president, Yankee Group. “Among these ought to be subscriber-controlled capabilities to view real-time usage data, monitor usage against their bill plan, and have the ability to dynamically alter or enhance subscription plans based on bandwidth and application usage.”