BBTM Part 3: Openet & Cricket

Openet
 
Michael Manzo's presentation focused around the top techniques and trends to watch for in mobile broadband.
#1: Smarter data service tiers
Add QoS payment scheme to speed and volume, allow users to pay for better access and quality or conversely, zero rate traffic at certain times of day when the network is less congested. It is a good idea, but the practical implementation seems complicated. Self care interface for data usage changes, which will trigger PCRF and Charging gateway, which will trigger in turn DPI and PCEF...


#2 service passes
prepay vouchers for data usage. 15$ for 250MB...
 This is in effect in many operators and has proven effective in term of data ARPU growth.


#3 OTT Content partnership
This is the one, I think that has the most mileage. As posted previously, in my opinion, it is inevitable that carriers will have to partner with Hulu, Youtube, iCloud, Netflix, Bittorrent... I cannot imagine  these OTT vendors seating idle while carriers try to monetize this traffic on their networks and to modify the intended user experience in the process. Again, before revenue share is to happen, QOE sharing is necessary.
Carriers and OTT properties need to compromise on what content and services should get what type of QoS in which circumstances to apportion a fair revenue share.


#4 TV everywhere
Premium content monetization for tablets. VOD everywhere sounds a sexy business model, when mobile broadband allows to share content across TV, Set top boxes, Blu ray players, video game consoles, tablets, laptops and smartphones. As previously discussed, it is a business model that has some way to go to be palatable for mass market.

#5 Fixed Mobile Convergence Parental control
Voice, text and browsing parental control. While I understand the value proposition and in some cases the regulatory constraints, this is the trend I am the most skeptical about. In my experience, trying to enforce parental control on content usage, is a bit like content-based charging. An interesting concept that is too complex to implement with today's technology. I don't think it is technically or logistically viable to maintain white / blacklist of URLs or domains to regulate your child's access to the internet.  The web properties change too fast and your average teenager knows enough about anonimizing and redirecting browsers and apps to circumvent any network based attempt toregulate that usage.



#6 Smarter could service
Expand policy, charging, optimization to the cloud. This will be the subject of a future post.



Cricket Leap
Leap is an interesting carrier, with a very innovative, disruptive positioning that allowed them to garner a very different customer base from the rest of US carriers:
Leap's customer base is in majority young (55% less than 35 year old), cost conscious (medium yearly income is less than $50k), from ethnic descent (60%), and use Cricket phone as their primary phone (95%!).

The key to attracting this demographics has historically been to offer prepaid contracts, with unlimited usage. The result is quite interesting with 5.8m subscribers, generating 2.8B$ revenue.

Their tiered offering using speeds and throttling for mobile broadband has been a staggering success. Today, mobile broadband revenue covers the entire CAPEX and OPEX of the network. Which means voice and text revenues are pure margin...

Going forward, Leap will differentiate further, using QoS and QoE levers to create an even more segmented pricing strategy to mobile broadband users.


On the question of traffic optimization, it is interesting to note that Leap commented "Anytime we implemented optimization techniques in our network, we did not see any negative impact on customer traffic".

BBTM part 2: Comverse & Continuous Computing

Comverse


Comverse is proposing a full spectrum holistic solution to video optimization, including PCEF, DPI, Optimization, Charging and some aspects of  PCRF.
What caught my attention is their strong push for Gi based optimization vs. Gn. 
They advocate that  measure of congestion at RAN level is inconsistent and inconclusive.

The big push is certainly as well an attempt to ward off the network vendors (ALU, NSN, Ericsson, Huawei, ZTE), by arguing that there is an inherent conflict of interest when these vendors are both trying to sell carriers capacity and optimization at the same time. (My experience of working with all these companies is that 80% of the time, the right hand does not know what the left hand does and that for conflict of interest to exist, it would require a lot better organization and strategy than what I have observed).



Comverse proposes that for effective cell-based congestion detection, a mechanism such as a radius interim messages,  triggered at cell level, not Rnc, would provide an effective way to relay RAN congestion indications to the core.


I agree with the premises but I am not sure of the conclusion. A lot of the congestion at RAN level is also signalling and you could end up in interesting snowball effects with Radius messages (notably inefficient, that is one of the primary reasons for Diameter's invention) could greatly contribute to the congestion they are trying to stave off. 


Now, Diameter repeaters at RAN level... that could help.

Continuous computing
I was curious to hear from CC after their recent acquisition by Radisys in May. They present themselves as an "arm dealer" in the optimization and traffic offload war between vendors and offer some interesting perspectives.



Offload is a cost effective way to manage surges and traffic increases but presents significant challenges in CALEA (Legal interception from Law Enforcement Agencies) and charging and policy. 
Effectively, when traffic is offloaded at RAN level, you need paths to trombone it back to the core network for charging, PCRF and optimization functions if you want to get most of your investment, while satisfying both legal regulations and customer SLA.

The rest of the presentation focused of course on Continuous Computing's solution that collocates DPI, traffic offload (on Lu interface, between Rnc and SGSN) and interacts "seamlessly" with their  video optimization, tromboning traffic back to the core before going to the internet through Gi.


I don't think that the "just another bump in the wire" theory actually works for video, where every millisecond of latency counts against the user experience.