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By Joseee Loudiadis, Alcatel-Lucent
Telco and cable service providers are clearly engaged in a race to sign up and retain subscribers while keeping average revenue per user (ARPU) prices from falling from the commoditization brought about by a highly competitive market. This climate has resulted in service portfolio diversification along three approaches that are often combined: offering tiered high speed internet (HSI) access bandwidth for different user categories, bundling voice, TV and HSI services into a triple play offering from a single service provider, and offering a multitude of hosted and off-net partner applications to expand beyond traditional services.
The goal is to increase per subscriber revenues and loyalty with personalized and innovative applications that are available at the click of a button. Putting end users in control of their services allows them to instantaneously tailor their service plan by selecting the service mix appropriate to their lifestyle. Subscribers can leverage flexible time-of-day usage rates, benefit from promotional offers and deliver a seamless integration with hosted applications from the service provider itself or their ecosystem partners, without requiring the manual assistance of the service provider’s call center operator.
But, the breath and variety of applications that service providers can bundle into an HSI or triple play personalized offering is gated, amongst other factors, by their back office’s ability to seamlessly provision and update billing information as requested by the user via its portal without relying on costly and slow human intervention. Take for example a seemingly trivial HSI portal feature that reports current service usage and offers some options once usage has been exceeded. Reporting data service usage with the current mediation billing infrastructure optimized for flat billing is the first challenge. Towering above that is the capability to automatically configure and reconfigure network resources dynamically to support portal redirection, a temporarily reduced bandwidth (until the end of the month), increase a monthly usage quota (top-up), or upgrade to a higher usage
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"The goal is to increase per subscriber revenues and loyalty with personalized and innovative applications that are available at the click of a button." |
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service package to reflect those changes to the billing system. In all, there are a number of aspects that must be considered to support the breadth of new services considered by service providers:
* provisioning must be expanded to include provisioning of all the applications bundled in the subscriber services,
* the infrastructure must cover transient services that require dynamic network re-configuration for the duration of its presence,
* usage-based billing requires service usage collection and dynamic re-configuration or portal redirection once the quota is exceeded
* the capability to dynamically accept or deny on-demand services in real-time based on the current network capacity must be introduced
* the network should dynamically improve the quality of service for those applications offered by the service provider (on-net) versus those offered by third party (off-net)
To overcome these challenges, billing and provisioning systems must be tightly integrated with a policy-based network access and control framework that has the ability to automatically control the network resources based on subscribers or application demands and report those modifications and service usage to billing systems.
Provisioning next generation services
To support the requirement for on-demand services and applications, provisioning must evolve beyond the traditional provisioning of network resources. It must combine static network configuration with the provisioning of the network policy manager and the applications’ frameworks.
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