Policy—An All Purpose Tool?

By: Elisabeth Rainge, Research Vice President, NGN Operations, IDC

Television, the Internet and phone calls used to be very different experiences. In particular, there was a gap in the experience of fixed line networks—which happened via PCs and cable television—and the experience of mobile networks—which happened via handsets. The gap was in the applications: voice or messaging on the mobile phone versus browsing, rich content and video on the PC or TV. Smartphones blur the customer experience of fixed and mobile, but subscribers rarely understand how the network challenges and capacity of mobile networks differ from fixed line networks. This puts a lot of pressure on mobile operators to improve customer experience. Colleagues and friends often ask me why a Skype call on a PC is better quality than a mobile phone connection. This is not about the application; it is about exposing the need to build network integrity, reliability and availability into mobile networks. To do this, it requires optimization and management techniques.

The communications service providers (CSPs) that I talk to are, like everyone, looking for ways to do more with less: budget challenges, staffing challenges, shifting priorities … the list goes on. In the more than 15 years that I’ve been at IDC and working with networking professionals, the focus of conversations has always been dominated by technology. Now, in 2011, it’s different. Business goals, including customer satisfaction improvements, have emerged in the past few years as the top context for almost all of the conversations. Having a successful business means having and keeping paying customers.

One way that these two themes—customer service usage and business goals—come together is policy control. Optimizing the services and networks to address customer expectations is the key way to apply policy control technology. At the same time, policy control technology can deliver a greater return on investment because it is generally a lower price point than the kinds of network hardware that can deliver roughly equal performance improvements (in a more general way).

The key to policy control though, is that it is about imposing business rules and business logic from the network infrastructure context. It is a tool for CSPs’ networking professionals and for business people. It’s also a tool suited to many types of services and many types of networks. As subscribers look for a consistent connectivity experience across multiple devices, policy control is an increasingly useful tool in the CSP’s toolbox.

Elisabeth Rainge manages IDC’s research into telecom industry operational practices and contributes to IDC’s broad portfolio of network infrastructure market research. Currently, she is leading IDC’s research of telecom software, focusing on business value. Specific areas of coverage include OSS/BSS, SDP, NGN, IMS, mobile, and the transition to IP networks.

A Simple Question: What Is a “Service”?

By: Dan Baker, Research Director, Technology Research Institute

Language—no matter which one—is imprecise in the way that it’s used to explain complex telecom subjects.

A perfect example in English is the term “service”.  What exactly does the word mean in a telecom context?  I’d guess there are probably 50 unique uses for the word “services” in telecom.  Unfortunately, “service” is about as descriptive a word as “thing”.

And as new, over-the-top services emerge, the vocabulary used to describe the “service provisioning” area has also become quite muddy.

Well, here’s my attempt to decipher the terms “service” and “service provisioning” more precisely:

One of the more confusing aspects of service provisioning is the policy area that Comptel is championing.  What’s interesting about policy is that while it’s enabled on the telecom side, the policy may actually be implemented and controlled in real time by the over-the-top provider.

You can be sure that in the years ahead our current definitions of what a telecom service is will be stretched dramatically as they were during the last decade.

While I’m sure my table of service terms has some flaws, perhaps you can use these definitions to spark some fruitful discussions with your peers and vendors, or here on “The Dynamics of OSS”.

In the end, I hope my definitions of telecom “service” will be of service to you :- )

Dan Baker is the research director of Technology Research Institute (TRI).   Since 1994, Baker has authored dozens of research studies in the BSS/OSS market.  He contributes articles to Vanilla Plus and writes a regular column for Billing & OSS World called Dan Baker Blog.