BroadHop
Heavy Reading unveiled “Scaling Up Policy: Balancing Cost & Functionality in the LTE Era” a business case analysis and cost model for the much needed shift by mobile operators to next generation policy management networks from traditional legacy platforms, as subscribers and traffic on networks continue to explode.
Telecom operators are shifting toward a new set of policy use cases focused on differentiation, personalization and monetization. And in this new environment, many more policies are being devised and deployed. As operators make the transition to LTE, the load on existing servers will continue to escalate rapidly. This raises some major issues about the ability of servers to cope and the likely impact on cost.
Through collaboration with Wireless 20/20, cost implications were specifically studied in LTE deployments. By examining the extensive modeling of business cases, costs, and existing real world examples, the research concludes that a next-generation policy platform is essential for mobile operators to scale to handle extremely high levels of demand and policy complexity, and meet the core need for a solution that can be deployed for the longer term, all at a manageable cost.
The modeling exercise showed that the cost of policy is only a small proportion (around 2%) of the overall cost of a new LTE build over a five-year build period in the next-generation policy case – and given the high strategic value of policy, the return on investment (ROI) is likely to be positive.
Key findings from the report show that by implementing a next-generation policy product, service providers will be able to massively scale policy deployment without adversely impacting cost structures, drive ROI, even for a complex policy deployment, integrate Policy 2.0 to become a key part of the core network architecture and have a more open and more flexible policy creation environment, reducing engineering/professional service costs associated with introducing new policies or amending existing ones