Policy Control is more about enabling than controlling
June 7, 2016 - Openet
You would be forgiven for thinking that policy control is all about mobile. Certainly, mobile is where it started. It is, however, important to remember that policy control is also a sharp-edged marketing tool, says real-time specialist Openet Telecom. It is equally important to understand that it can be a double-edged sword.
Take the Netflix effect. The amount of data that Netflix and other online video services use has driven a large increase in the amount of data being consumed. Ofcom, the UK regulator says that the amount of data downloaded increased by 93 percent between 2013 and 2014, and the speed increased by 28 percent. This sounds like good news, but an HD video from Netflix can eat data at 3GB an hour and an Ultra HD video can account for 7GB an hour. Even with a significant data allowance, that does not make for much viewing before, say, a 20GB bucket is used up.
Policy control allows an operator to send alerts about data usage – along with solutions – to customers to avoid the dreaded bill shock. Bill shock is still one of the pressing issues for customer experience. Managing it, by alerting customers, and indeed telling them about, for instance, turbo boost options to better manage large downloads, must make sense, according to the Openet white paper, ‘Policy in a multi-play, multi-network world’.
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