How the broadband of the future will be billed

Such scenarios are still mostly theory for now. Very few service providers have used aggressive and flexible policy-driven pricing schemes as a way to manage network capacity or influence customer usage. But savvy providers are beginning to think this way, billing experts say, and we may be on the brink of a time when aggressive pricing and packaging experimentation become the norm in the consumer broadband market.

Up to now, policy servers have been used mostly for static network management, but that is beginning to change. Most service providers today use policy for service assurance, for instance, reserving adequate bandwidth to deliver promised video-on-demand, voice-over-IP or online gaming applications. But using policy to address more general broadband delivery issues — either by managing congestion in the network or in conjunction with charging systems shaping customer consumption — is becoming much more common, said Randy Fuller, vice president of business development for policy server vendor Camiant.

While some deep packet inspection (DPI) and network-management boxes include policy control capabilities, pure-play policy vendors such as Camiant contend the best network architecture removes policy enforcement from the router or DPI box and layers it into the network for maximum flexibility. In a large network, eight or 10 distributed policy servers can “manage thousands of edge routers,” Fuller said.

“Almost all of our customers are experimenting with new methods for bandwidth management that include using policy control to do enforcement,” Fuller said. Yet building rules to control network use is only part of the equation, he said. “There's a very strong need to make sure no one gets surprised when they get their bill.”

And that's where more flexible charging and billing systems come in.

“The general concept is knowing what a customer is doing at any point in time — whether they are using a lot of bandwidth or downloading a movie — before I do the billing cycle,” said Alice Bartram, assistant vice president of marketing for billing vendor Comverse. “We see billing moving deeper and deeper into the network, allowing operators to have more control over their business.”