Zeugma brings brains to metering

Service providers need to work to educate their customers and then provide them with more flexible options for using bandwidth more intelligently, including offering premium video services – something the surveys show consumers would pay extra to get, Walsh said.

“A service provider can get really creative with types of packages they offer that can meet different needs,” Sherbo said. “They can do it on per-subscriber basis. One subscriber could be hard capped and dropped; another could have granular overage charges and time-of-day usage. There are a number of different ways to do it. For example, you could have a 10-gigabyte limit during peak periods and a 40-gigabyte limit during off-peak or even no limit from 12 a.m. to 4 a.m. The idea is to encourage downloads during the off-peak time.”

Zeugma is in active field trials of its Zeugma Services Node with service providers in North America and Europe, Walsh said, and SmartMeter will become part of those trials. “That’s one of the advantages of our system is that it can be easily dropped in as an application,” Walsh said.