Balancing Net neutrality with policy management, SDM objectives

Operators want the right to compete and ensure long-term survival and profitability, and for that reason they hope any impending Net neutrality legislation doesn’t mitigate their ability to deploy quality of service and traffic controls within their networks.

Operators need to influence consumer consumption so that profitable customers are not crowded out by less-profitable ones that will consume as much peer-to-peer (P2P), video and gaming content as possible in the current all-you-can-eat world.

The day is coming when tiered pricing models and prioritization of traffic will be necessary because constant network buildouts are impossible to feasibly support in terms of capex.

Shira Levine, directing analyst for next-gen operations support systems and policy with Infonetics Research, referred to the Net neutrality issue as a “wild card” that caused some operators to initially scale back investments in policy management because they were concerned about what the FCC was going to do.

“I think service providers have come to recognize that this thing isn’t going to be resolved any time soon, plus they’re increasingly seeing the value in more subscriber-focused policy control, and I think that will drive investment going forward,” Levine said, noting that the public comment period for Net neutrality recently came to a close.

In many ways, she contends that the current debate over Net neutrality is becoming somewhat “outdated,” as the primary focus originally centered on equal access to applications. But now it’s more about subscribers than applications. “To remain relevant, operators need to control access on a subscriber basis, not just an application basis, and that means implementing subscriber-focused policy control,” Levine said.

Under a subscriber-centric model, it will no longer be a matter of, say, limited P2P traffic across the board, but making decisions on a subscriber basis and charging accordingly. So, for example, that might be recognizing a platinum subscriber has unlimited access for a higher rate, while traffic may be throttled for a gold-level subscriber who pays less.

There are many different types of policies to enforce, with some industry experts saying there are more than 100 types of policies that currently tie to valid use cases for differentiating content in creative ways.

“You can call refer to policy management or subscriber data management as good competitive business practice that also addresses Net neutrality; it really comes down to being transparent to the customer in terms of what you are doing,” said Joanne Steinberg, marketing director for Bridgewater.

She maintains that operators can address network congestion and bandwidth usage in ways that align with Net neutrality objectives.

In that light, there are increasingly comparisons of communications to utilities, which charge people according to their usage to try and change behaviors. In charging people more to do energy-intensive activities during peak hours or in crediting people who wait for off-peak hours, utilities shape behavior. Service providers can do the same by encouraging subscribers to download bandwidth-intensive videos, applications or movies at certain times of the day.

As the FCC continues to figure out its jurisdiction, following the recent appeals court decision that overturned its Comcast ruling, operators will continue to use policy control and subscriber data management. “They just have to strive to be more transparent so that subscribers are given choices about how to use applications,” Steinberg said.

Companies like Metratech are looking at how billing can also play a role in shaping user behaviors through income-based billing models, based on the principle that people respond to rewards that translate into value (cash, credits or points that equal cash rewards).

The mechanisms of policy management, subscriber data management and more intuitive billing will combine with strategies around offloading data to different access networks (e.g., Wi-Fi and femtocells) so that operators’ actions don’t impact Net neutrality objectives.