Policy management takes off, with LTE setting the direction

Early deployments of policy management were relatively simple and did not tax servers too harshly. Now, according to a new white paper from policy control company BroadHop, the focus will turn to differentiation, personalization and monetization and demands will increase dramatically.

Policy management is currently hitting a tipping point as telcos deploy tools to manage ‘bill shock’ and create a better customer experience. Over the next few years many more policies will be devised and deployed. The transition to LTE will increase the demand, as controlling QoS, managing costs and enhancing the customer experience become paramount priorities for telcos.

According to Pyramid Research, more than 200 million smartphones were sold worldwide in 2010 and this figure is expected to exceed 500 million by 2015. The total number of smartphones in use will exceed 1 billion by 2015, and these devices are becoming more powerful and, at the same time, customers are using more and more of their functionality.

The research and interviews that underlie the paper suggest that telcos plan to use policy in an ever wider range of situations and to put it at the heart of both network and service strategy. Uses cited by carriers include allocating scarce resources, such as spectrum; managing network congestion; yield management; improving the performance of applications that customers value; giving customers control over their connection; notifications; dashboards; parental controls and campaign management.

Telecom operators must understand both the scaling and cost implications of this transition, according to the paper. Policy will become a key part of the core network architecture, and like other elements of that architecture it will need to be future-proof. Based on calculations of transactions per second (TPS), the paper illustrates the scale of the explosion.

A 3GPP network of 10 million mobile customers will scale from about 2,200 TPS in the base (current) case to almost 23,000 TPS in the mature case, after three years – the lifetime of the policy management system. In this example policy scales from nearly 25,000 TPS at the end of Year 1 to more than 75,000 TPS at the end of Year 3.

Policy servers will need to follow the path trodden by other mission critical processes such as billing and charging in order to do what it says on the wrapper – manage the policy of the company in an increasing complex, and rapidly expanding online world.