|
Mobile & Wireless
Interview
Why bandwidth management benefits us all
An interview with Susie Kim Riley
by Chris Snow
Multi-tiered service plans may be the future of broadband access. Last week TelecomEngine spoke with Susie Kim Riley, Founder and CTO of Camiant, a Massachusetts-based developer of intelligent network control and management solutions. Camiant was acquired by Tekelec in May, and Riley now serves as their Chief Marketing Officer. The topic of the hour: policy control and its use for bandwidth allocation, perhaps one of the most misunderstood issues in all of telecommunications.
The growth of the Internet is huge and isn't slowing down. According to Riley, bandwidth must be allocated effectively, and operators must dynamically control services, or risk collapse of their networks and poor overall customer experiences. Before its acquisition, Camiant was already deploying their management solutions around the world, and major operators were thankful to have them. Operational and capital expenditures were reduced by automating the error-prone scaling process and proactively controlling the network to more fairly distribute resources amongst users, thereby improving the overall customer experiences.
But more importantly, Riley is excited to point out that aside from op-ex and cap-ex savings, bandwidth allocation can actually mean new opportunities for revenue creation....
The key is segmentation. Right now, broadband caps are set up as more or less ‘one size fits all’ service plans. Some treat it like mobile phone billing. Go over your allotted "minutes," or "data limit" in this case, and the network begins charging significant overages, or even cuts off users entirely. Others offer ‘unlimited’ broadband – everybody gets all they can consume, but the heaviest of users can negatively impact the quality of experience of the vast majority. Where the Tekelec-Camiant technology differs is in how services can be differentiated. By implementing a multi-tiered service plan, with different bandwidth/speed and usage levels, users who transfer more data than their specified limit may be escalated to the next tier. This comes at additional cost to the end-user, but nothing close to the dramatic and confusing overage charges of the past. Other plans may include the ability to throttle the heaviest of users to a lower bandwidth tier until their next monthly billing cycle – but their service is never ‘cut’ off. Abrupt cut-offs results in very unhappy customers and churn. Examples of yet even more innovative services could include the ability for the subscriber to temporarily ‘turbo boost’ their service – to potentially accelerate a download, for example. Different service plans could have different pricing associated with them, giving subscribers more choices in picking the plan that best suits their needs.
According to Riley, it is this transition, from a "one size fits all" scheme to a segmented services model that will capture a larger subscriber base. Heavy users, or those who demand more flexibility, may still opt into tiers which fit their requirements, while casual users may subscribe to lower limit plans at reduced cost.
What about the human element? Particularly in the wake of AT&T's recent announcement that they would be discontinuing the Unlimited Data Plan, policy management finds itself amidst heated debate. However, Riley points out, these are mostly "knee-jerk" reactions. Certainly, no customer wants to feel as if their service has been downgraded. But Riley feels the public needs more education. For example, many fail to realize that "99 percent of clients will never even come close" to download limits because they're simply too huge: in the vicinity of over 5 or 10 gigabytes per month for mobile internet services in some countries. But even though very few reach these levels, their draw wreaks havoc on the network, affecting the service of the vast majority of the other subscribers on the network. Operators have no choice but to respond.
Another consideration: many forget that throttling only occurs during peak hours, when the network must handle the most congestion. Furthermore, the users scaled the most don't even generally notice the throttling taking place! Typically this heavy load is created by file-sharing users, who leave their client active all day without paying attention.
But perhaps the best argument in favor of bandwidth management, is an end-user's economic one. "If I'm a casual user," says Riley "I don't want to subsidize heavy users, why should I pay for those users?" Indeed the infrastructure of networks are laid and improved based on the needs of their most demanding users. Riley is optimistic one day there will be many choices for subscribers and opportunities for them to choose and pay for services which suits them best.
Ultimately, scaling has arrived. But that's a good thing. The Internet is a shared resource and as it continues to grow, an arrangement in which a very small percentage of users can draw the majority of traffic cannot continue to function. It's in an operator's best interest to improve all customers' experiences, and policy management is a necessary step. Along the way, operators can look forward to brand new customers, who will finally have the opportunity to pay for services that are customized to their needs, without the fear or shock of overages or service cut-off.
|
|
|
