Telcos likely to use price to manage bandwidth hogs

Comcast may be one of the first – and certainly most visible – service providers to publicly implement a system for coping with heavy bandwidth users. But by strictly focusing on managing traffic, rather than trying to influence user behavior, its approach may be more of an anomaly than the norm, according to one vendor that says it has seen about 30 bandwidth management requests for proposals (RFPs) in the last 12 months.

“Most customers want not just the ability to cap and shape traffic but the option to let consumers upgrade in real time,” said Mike Manzo, chief marketing officer of Openet, which formally released its policy- and billing-based “Fair Usage” solution this week.

In such scenarios, Openet’s FusionWorks Policy Manager and Convergent Charging products work in conjunction with a deep packet inspection (DPI) box to help carriers track and enforce subscriber bandwidth usage policies – as well as charge in real-time for additional service and usage levels if the customers choose. The solution provides a self-care Web site to let users view their usage trends; enables email and text messaging alerts to users approaching limits; enables the creation of exception policies, for example in the case of high-value of loyal customers; and supports multiple options for purchasing additional bandwidth, including pay-per-use, usage bundles and service tier upgrades.

Comcast deployed its new “protocol agnostic” bandwidth management platform across its entire subscriber base at the end of last year. Under the new system, Comcast will slow down the traffic consumed by any customer – regardless of protocol or source – whenever they exceed a certain amount of capacity. Targeted users would have their quality of service levels lowered for a short time – typically 15 minutes – until congestion is relieved.

While such an approach can relieve traffic spikes, one of its weaknesses is that it doesn’t change user behavior long term, nor does it encourage users to actually pay for the bandwidth they consume. An alternative approach – one Openet’s Manzo sees gaining greater favor in the industry – relies on real-time offers of service-tier upgrades, one-time “power boost” buys and loyalty-style programs to shape, and in some cases monetize, customer behavior.

Openet has seen about 30 bandwidth management RFPs this year – winning a handful of deployments, it claims – and most are taking a fairly sophisticated approach to managing usage. One challenge for MSOs like Comcast is that they typically haven’t deployed real-time charging in their telecom sides, Manzo said. “Cable operators [like Comcast], though, have not typically deployed real-time charging capabilities the way mobile operators certainly have.”

This could make Comcast’s approach a stepping stone, rather than the end game, in traffic-shaping battles.