Uncapping data: Vendors explore alternatives to mobile Internet quotas

At CTIA Wireless, AT&T introduced the first of what it promised would be numerous mobile broadband devices, a series of netbooks it would sell at deep discounts with a subscription to a two-year data plan. There was one catch, though: Data usage on the 3G network would be capped at 200 megabytes to 5 gigabytes a month depending on the plan.

As US operators delve further into mobile data services and offer increasingly bandwidth-hungry devices, they find themselves in a delicate balancing act: They want to open up their networks to the new array of mobile broadband applications, but they don't want to open the spigot too far. Delivering a byte of data over a wireless network is far more expensive than delivering one over a wireline broadband network. The problem for them is putting a billing model in place that allows them to recover their operational costs while encouraging mobile data growth. Increasingly operators have resorted to data caps, which either cut off customers when they reach a certain data threshold or trigger punitive per-megabyte fees for any overage.

Those capping measures are geared at limiting broadband usage on the wireless network rather than encouraging it, but vendors and consultants are starting to propose alternatives to data caps that would allow operators to implement tiered and dynamic tariffing policies. Such techniques would allow carriers to charge higher rates for high-data-consumption services such as video or peer-to-peer applications, create bandwidth classes that limit network capacity available to individual apps or subscribers and even reward customers with lower rates for using under-utilized portions of the network or surfing during non-peak hours.

Today HP and Allot Communications announced they are collaborating to deliver a super-charged policy control and charging engine to wireless operators. The solution uses Allot's deep packet inspection (DPI) gateway to analyze all traffic traversing the wireless network, information that HP's billing and policy platform can use to apply different tariffs, bandwidths or service quality to individual users or applications in real time.

"HP is leveraging our DPI technology so it can have subscriber and application awareness on millions of flows in the network," said Scott Poretsky, director of solutions architecture for Allot. What rates the HP platform charges and what policies it enforces are completely up to the individual operator, Poretsky said, but the possible scenarios are countless. An operator could place bandwidth limitations on certain over-the-top services such as the video, VoIP or peer-to-peer, or it could do the reverse, using quality of service (QoS) policies to prioritize those applications if they were offered by the operator or a partner. By using DPI, operators and eventually even customers could tailor mobile data plans to specific use cases, creating video-centric or gaming-centric data plans that pair up with specific mobile devices.