Mobile Personalization

Bridgewater Systems (News - Alert), a provider of mobile personalization services for operators, was named the top 2009 policy server market leader by Infonetics Research in its April 2010 report “Policy Servers Biannual Worldwide and Regional Market Size, Share and Forecasts.”

In the report, which also reveals that the mobile policy server market will grow to $1.2 billion in 2014, Infonetics researchers said service providers are increasingly implementing policy controls to optimize 3G networks, offload mobile data traffic and more.

“Bridgewater continues to grow its wireless business, expanding its 3G deployments in 2009 and staking its claim in the emerging WiMAX (News - Alert) and LTE market opportunities,” said Shira Levine, directing analyst, Next Gen OSS and Policy, Infonetics Research. Its close integration of policy and subscriber data management on a single platform creates a compelling proposition for operators looking to implement subscriber-aware policy control capabilities.”

David Sharpley (News - Alert), senior vice president, Bridgewater Systems, told TMCnet that Bridgewater has taken an integrated, multi-access control plane approach that combines policy control with service control and subscriber data management.

“This enables service providers to alleviate 3G radio access network congestion, offload mobile data traffic to WiFi (News - Alert) or femtocells, transform to 4G and give subscribers a better mobile broadband experience,” Sharpley told TMCnet. “This is a compelling proposition in the market. In addition, the Bridgewater Policy Controller providers real-time network, application and subscriber policies on the same platform. By integrating all three types of policies, service providers can offer more innovative usage- and application-based service plans, and give subscribers greater control over their mobile data usage.”

Sharpley told TMCnet that policies are intelligent business rules that control a number of things, including:

1. What, where and under which circumstances subscribers can access content and applications online;
2. How specific applications are delivered -- regardless of who is using them;
3. The way in which network resources such as bandwidth are allocated to enable services and fair usage; How subscribers can be prioritized based on real time conditions such as congestion in specific cell sites;
4. When and under which circumstances data traffic, subscribers and applications can be redirected to alternative networks such WiFi to alleviate 3G network congestion. 

Sharpley offered this example: If Joe is an iTunes customer, then he is allowed to unlimited video downloads. But if the network is congested, Joe cannot access this service. Therefore, a mobile policy product might allow Joe to have a higher-level premium data plan so he could access these services. Another example: If Maria is attached to Cell Site A, but it is congested, an operator could offer her the mobile policy option to switch to WiFi or receive a temporary bandwidth boost.  

“There are several market challenges that service providers can solve using policy control,” Sharpley told TMCnet. “They can alleviate network congestion and better balance mobile data traffic by ensuring fair bandwidth usage, offloading subscribers to WiFi, and giving subscribers different options  depending on their service plans. They can also give subscribers greater transparency to their real time mobile data usage on their device to prevent bill shock.”