Policy Control and Charging 2012 Conference Highlights

Policy Control and Charging 2012 Conference Highlights 24th-26th April 2012 at the Krasnapolsky Hotel, Amsterdam

A Few Highlights from my Post Conference Workshop

The Classic Telecom Mistake: Technology Focus

Yield and Revenue Management

& Cost Management

Policy Management

© 2012 Alan Quayle Business and Service Development 3

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

• 14:00 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


Why Implement Policy?

LTE

Congestion

Regulatory

Service Innovation

Africa, LATAM, Eastern Europe,

APAC (developing)

Europe (roaming data spending

controls)

Most developed markets

US, APAC (developed)


Vendor Types Part 1 of 3

• Charging / BSS vendors: such as Oracle, Volubill and Redknee. Lead on BSS

o These vendors believe that a tightly integrated policy and charging solution offering will provide them with a

competitive edge.

o Key is the charging product leads the sale, not the policy product, in fact Redknee does not sell a PCRF

o The charging market is as populous as the policy market, with 90 percent of the companies commanding revenues

under $300 million.

o The segment will experience significant consolidation in the next three to five years.

• Large system vendors: such as Ericsson, ALU and Nokia Siemens Networks

(NSN). Lead on PCRF

o These vendors’ revenues are driven on the product side by a comprehensive product portfolio that includes a radio,

signaling and Evolved Packet Core (EPC) offerings.

o They have robust PCRF product offerings that are part of an overall control plane strategy. However, until now the

policy market has not been large enough or strategic enough to draw the focus of these vendors.

o They still lag in market share compared to the best-of-breed vendors

o This vendor segment will gain in market share, particularly as the best-of-breed category is absorbed (through

acquisition) into the following vendor segment.



• Control plane vendors such as Tekelec, Openet and Amdocs (Bridgewater): Lead on

PCRF

o This is an emerging and coalescing vendor segment focused on the complex and unique requirements of the control plane

of the MNO.

o Policy vendors in this segment hail from different corners of the network market including B/OSS (Amdocs),

performance and subscriber data management (Tekelec), and billing and charging (Openet).

o It would also include Acme Packet, if only that company had a policy control product. Vendors in this segment are

expanding into the product categories that make up the network (most often mobile) operator control plane—not just

policy and charging, but also Packet Exchange Controllers (PECs)/Diameter routing, session border controllers (SBCs),

subscriber profile repository (SPR) and Home Subscriber Server (HSS).

o One of the virtues of this market segment is that the MNO has a history of purchasing these products from best-of-breed

vendors as well as from their traditional system vendors.

• IP vendors such as Cisco and Juniper. Lead on PCRF / PCEF / Other

o They are different from the large system vendors because their product strategy is still largely influenced by their routing

products, not, as in the case of the large system vendors, by a radio, signaling and EPC product set.

o Like the system vendors, Cisco and Juniper have not been impressed enough by the policy control market to place

significant development focus on it in the past.

o Today, these vendors acknowledge the strategic importance of the policy market and the carrier control plane in general.

However, their strategies for addressing the market, while different from each other’s, are still largely driven by their data

plane focus. © 2012 Alan Quayle Business and Service Development 9


• DPI Vendors: Lead on PCEF

o Cisco, Genband, Sandvine,

o Combine enforcement and control into one box

• Gateway / Optimization Vendors: Focus on their control points

o ByteMobile, Acision, ACME Packet, Openwave, Juniper

o Use their platform that controls content in some way to implement

policies

• Other

o OpenCloud

o Diameter signaling routers and other mediation devices

© 2012 Alan Quayle Business and Service Development

10

PCC Landscape


Other

BSS PCRF

PCEF

11

Yield Management Background

• Yield Management is used in many service industries to describe techniques to allocate limited resources,

such as airplane seats or hotel rooms, among a variety of customers, such as business or leisure travelers.

o Since these techniques are used by firms with extremely perishable goods, or by firms with services that cannot be stored

at all, these concepts and tools are often called perishable asset revenue management or simply revenue management.

• Yield management, including overbooking and dynamic pricing, has been an enormously important

innovation in the service industries.

o American Airlines credits yield management techniques for a revenue increase of $500 million/year and Delta Airlines

uses similar systems to generate additional revenues of $300 million per year.

o While the airlines are the most sophisticated users of yield management, these practices have begun to appear in other

service industries. For example, Marriott hotels credits their yield management system for additional revenues of $100

million per year.

o All of these revenue increases have been achieved with relatively small increases in capacity and costs.

• My aim here is to describe yield management's basic concepts and provide details about a particular

application.

o Real-world example is provided by the Hyatt Regency hotel at 125 East Main Street in Rochester, NY.

o The hotel has 210 King/Queen rooms used by both business and leisure travelers.

o The hotel must decide whether to sell rooms well in advance at a relatively low price (i.e. to leisure travelers), or to ‘hold

out’ and wait for a sale at a higher price to late-booking business travelers.


Where and Why Firms Practice Yield Management

• Business environments with the following five characteristics are appropriate for the

practice of yield management (in parentheses we apply each characteristic to the

Hyatt hotel):

1. It is expensive or impossible to store excess resource (we cannot store tonight’s room for use by

tomorrow night’s customer).

2. Commitments need to be made when future demand is uncertain (we must set aside rooms for

business customers – “protect” them from low-priced leisure travelers -before we know how

many business customers will arrive).

3. The firm can discriminate among customer segments, and each segment has different demand

curves (purchase restrictions and refundability requirements help to segment the market

between leisure and business customers. The latter are more indifferent to the price.).

4. The same unit of capacity can be used to deliver many different products or services (rooms are

essentially the same, whether used by business or leisure travelers).

5. Producers are profit-oriented and have broad freedom of action (in the hotel industry,

withholding rooms from current customers for future profit is not illegal or morally

irresponsible. On the other hand, such practices would be questionable in emergency wards or

with organ transplants).


Sounds a lot like Telecoms! 13

Operator Survey


Demographics (97 Operators Surveyed)


Why are you deploying policy management infrastructure?


What are the barriers to deploying policy?


End Customer Survey


Demographic Profile


Age Distribution


Geo-Distribution


Has your mobile phone bill ever shocked you?


22 Bill shock is a normal customer experience

What matters most about your mobile phone service and bill?


23

The importance of value and simplicity / clarity came up many times. Value is a tough issue as its perception based and web-services are influencing perception.

Would you buy Quality of Service?


Do you understand what Quality of Service means?

After a explanation: What do you think of Quality of Service?

QoS is going to be a difficult

sell!

24

What Matters…

Value & Simplicity

We’ve got to focus policy on what matters to the customer not to us. 25