For telecom operators the marginal growth of data revenue share, in the realm of high opex and always on-the-toe competition, is an encouraging trend; hence they are in immense need to channelize every data monetization opportunity. Evident in deep customisation to upsell/cross-sell user plans, family packs, add-on service packs, time-of-day plans, smartbytes or additional usage quota for a service of choice (on-demand), quota transfer between networks/user accounts and the shared group quotas.
Simultaneously, the networks are transforming from the legacy to the all-IP networks, allowing service innovation. FMC is allowing fixed and mobile networks to converge along with enabling operators to offer triple play service. The customer has the option to subscribe multiple services from a single operator and pay for the service of choice or as per the byte and QoS he needs. But, offering these flexi-services on the front-end needs strong backend platforms.
This is where next generation policy manager plays a key role. It enables reservation or limit of bandwidth usage for subscriber accessing all applications or for certain applications only and offer plans that are optimized for different usage patterns.
Quota-on-Demand
Traditionally the service is cut-off directly or the user experiences a throttled speed/lower QoS on reaching quota limit, leading to a bad customer experience, and a missed revenue opportunity. Now on customer reaching his usage limit, the next generation policy manager enables operators to offer additional quota (with top-up or add-on plans) for a specific service or application, pushing more bytes and offering better QoS to the user and eventually better monetization.
Quota Advance
Suppose a user has 6 months’ validity plan with allocation of 2GB every month. If he wishes, the user can borrow quota from his own plan, from the following months and use it in current month.
Quota Rollover
Contrary to Quota advance, in Quota Rollover, if the current month quota is underutilized, the quota can be rolled over to the consecutive month.
Quota Gift
Peers/Friends/Family or any-to-any user option to gift a quota value.
Shared Quota between Users
Group plans can be availed between a set of users. The quota as shared between group members, can be consumed as per requirement without or with limit restrictions. The principal plan user can limit each user’s quota value from the overall value.
Quota Transfer
Next generation policy manager allows transfer of quota between user accounts or between networks. For example, a user may consume more quota in his mobile logins compared to the home broadband he usually surfs only over the weekends. Such transfer of Quota will allow the user to transfer from his home subscription to be transferred and added to his mobile data limits.
Elitecore Policy Manager offers a framework that includes a service and quota manager with dynamic session management capabilities. It becomes possible to roll-out innovative data monetization schemes and bundles, for a customer across any access device and network. The Quota Manager can work independently for fixed volume based quota management or can integrate with external systems for quota information. It can integrate with OCS and OFCS system via Sy interface, CDR, SOAP API or proprietary interfaces as per individual operator’s requirement.