MWC: Allot turbo-charges policy platform for LTE

Allot Communications (NASDAQ:ALLT) has souped up its Service Gateway Sigma platform for what it expects to be an upcoming deluge of mobile data traffic over the next generation of mobile broadband networks. The Sigma E’s core policy control and service functions haven’t changed, but its throughput has been enhanced from 60 Gb/s to 160 GB/s, allowing it to scale up to 8 million subscribers and whatever bandwidth-sucking applications they chose to use, said Jonathan Gordon, marketing director for Allot.

The Sigma E platform, which Allot plans to launch at Mobile World Congress next month, uses deep packet inspection and a handful of other detection techniques to sniff out different types of traffic traversing the network. Working in unison with a policy server, the platform can apply different priorities to those different types of traffic—say prioritizing VoIP over streaming video—based on an operators’ preferences and the types of service plans its customers subscribe, too. For instance streaming video may always get the lowest priority level on the mobile network except for customers with a premium video streaming plan, in which case that video traffic would be prioritized above all others.

Like Allot’s other gateways, the Sigma E is network agnostic, working on wireline and wireless networks, but Allot singled out new mobile broadband networks such as long-term evolution because wireless operators are facing a much bigger capacity crunch their wireline counterparts and are looking for ways to ease it, Gordon said. New high-bandwidth applications and applications are outpacing carriers’ abilities to deliver capacity, making intelligent charging models that take more into account than bandwidth consumed more attractive. Gordon said that operators in Latin America have readily begun adopting such strategies, offering bronze, silver and gold plans to customers, in which the distinction between plans lies with prioritization of access rather than buckets of megabytes or gigabytes.

Adoption of such policies in the U.S. has proven much more problematic as any discussion over prioritizing or charging more for one type of application or another invariable runs into net neutrality concerns. But Gordon said he believes its only a matter of time before operators embrace such strategies.

“In the U.S. the big step was to move away from flat rate data plans, which many people said would never happen,” Gordon said. “The U.S. taken that initial step by moving away from those all-you-can-eat plans.”