Mobile Personalization

The success of mobile broadband services is a good thing. But it does have a downside: It has sparked exponential growth in mobile data traffic.

This traffic boom is being driven by the popularity of smartphones and laptop data cards, say officials of Bridgewater Systems (News - Alert), citing an increase in the use of applications such as mobile Internet browsing and video, and unlimited and flat-rate data plans.

Bridgewater offers products designed, they say, to “help service providers predict and manage data growth, while ensuring a high level of service through the implementation of network, application, and subscriber policies that respect and adapt to subscriber behaviors.”

And this is important, since subscriber, service and policy control offerings “have been proven in Tier 1 service provider networks that handle billions of mobile data transactions per month,” company officials contend, adding that they “solve the network performance and subscriber experience challenges associated with high growth mobile data services.”

One particular offering is the company’s WideSpan system, described as an integrated portfolio offering which “enables personalization in a high mobile transaction environment.” It’s anchored by Bridgewater's Subscriber Data Broker, a subscriber data management product which integrates the Bridgewater®Service Controller and the Bridgewater Policy Controller products in a scalable, carrier-class blade server environment.

The way company officials explain it, the system lets service providers manage network resources based on a unified view of subscribers, including their profile, usage, and dynamic state information in real time. It lets them scale mobile data transactions by adding additional blades as required, and predict when hardware needs to be upgraded, based on the number of mobile transactions being conducted by subscribers, resulting in improved forecasting and management of subscriber growth.

The product is also pitched as a way for users to reduce costs by implementing a pre-integrated and pre-configured system with certified transaction throughput.