Spotlight: Tackling policy control, cloud and virtualization with ItsOn

The wireless telecommunications space continues to evolve, led by rapidly changing technology that seems to both thrive on and feed mobility. A lot of recent changes have revolved around the software-side of the business as wireless carriers look for ways to extract more revenues from operations.
One sector that has seen a lot of development is in the use of cloud to allow wireless carriers to offer more flexibility in billing and policy control. RCR Wireless News recently covered this topic in an extensive feature report and accompanying webinar.
To provide some more light on the subject, Greg Raleigh, CEO, chairman and founder of ItsOn, provided answers on a number of topics related to the role of policy control, how it has evolved, and the impact virtualization and cloud have had on the space.
RCR Wireless News: How has policy control changed over the past five years?
Greg Raleigh: Until very recently, commercially-deployed policy control systems involved basic zero rating of IP addresses, domain names and [over-the-air] activation of tablet service plans. The pace of change increased dramatically when ItsOn launched Zact Mobile. Zact proved to mobile operators all over the world that instant, on-device, self-service purchase and control of mobile service plans (e.g., such as user-controlled family plans) is ready for commercial deployment. This has created a new market for cloud-based virtual policy orchestration systems that enhance and provide smart service capabilities. These systems allow mobile operators to quickly design and deploy new types of service plans with new revenue models and higher customer loyalty without significant changes to their existing infrastructure. This has provided an easy way for mobile operators to move forward into a new “virtual policy” era to save costs, enhance customer loyalty and increase revenue.
RCRWN: What impact has the explosive growth in mobile data usage had on the evolution of policy control?
Raleigh: Differentiation in data services has been very important since many mobile operators now provide voice and text at very competitive prices – typically with unlimited voice and text, along with one or two options for the number of gigabytes in a data package. But, this really isn’t a very strong point of difference when every viable mobile operator offers network speeds and coverage that is either on par with their competitors or will be within a couple of years. So, we’re looking at a rapidly closing window of time when a mobile operator can win customers with the message “Our network offers the best data connection,” something which has sparked a very competitive pricing battle in order to drive growth.
In the long run, the winners will use enhanced policy control to differentiate service delivery and personalization and offer better self-service controls at the individual device level to families or enterprise IT managers. This type of differentiation engenders increased customer loyalty and reduced churn, and delivers more user-friendly service models that gain market share and enhance mobile operator revenues.
RCRWN: Where does virtualization fit into policy control?
Raleigh: What we started out calling “mobile network virtualization” five years ago, is now known as “network function virtualization.” This term is overused. Instead, we use “smart services” to describe our cloud-based enhancement to mobile operator networks.
Part of the confusion is that NFV conversations refer only to virtualizing the traffic plane path by moving data path processing from dedicated gateways and DPI boxes to general purpose servers in the cloud. The reality is that there are two types of mobile operator virtualization – the traffic plane and the policy plane. The “policy plane” I refer to is the combination of systems used for BSS and billing, OSS, intelligent service control, rating, mediation and service activation. Virtualizing the traffic plane is much easier today than virtualizing the policy plane because the policy plane involves many different, disparate systems that are all managed by different network management systems. If an operator virtualizes the traffic plane without upgrading and virtualizing the policy plane, it is not possible to offer new, more personalized and more intelligent voice and data services.
At ItsOn, we integrate the policy plane with an on-device agent to provide a real-time, interactive user experience for service personalization – which is the key to introducing a whole new generation of mobile services. The task is to use virtualization to augment, enhance and automate orchestration for these very disparate functions.
RCRWN: What impact will virtualization have in future policy control development?
Raleigh: Virtualization of the policy plane is an absolutely essential ingredient for the new world of personalized mobile services. It is entirely impractical to implement the required policy plane enhancements by upgrading or replacing existing BSS/OSS systems because they do not have the required functionality, the required tie-in with a real-time, on-device user experience agent and the required automatic orchestration capabilities. Attempting to implement the policy control features now desired by mobile operators would be a “forklift upgrade” to “rip and replace” the existing billing and policy systems – something that is entirely impractical.
ItsOn’s policy plane creates a new, parallel policy and network stack using a few simple existing interfaces without any significant changes to existing policy plane or traffic plane systems. This is why our mobile operator customers are so excited – they can begin moving forward immediately with rolling out fresh new services for their users with a trivial capital investment and a few months of testing.
RCRWN: Where are carriers in terms of fully utilizing virtual policy systems?
Raleigh: Since ItsOn has the only commercially available virtual policy solution, we know exactly where the market stands. So far, we have two major mobile operator deployment contracts. One is for postpaid services and one for prepaid services. And we have several other contract discussions in progress.
RCRWN: How will the move towards virtualization impact carrier deployment of policy control services?
Raleigh: Given the level of activity we are seeing with our customers and what we see in the global industry news, we are confident that over the next two years, the majority of mobile operator networks will deploy and utilize virtual policy plane systems like what ItsOn offers.
RCRWN: What impact does virtualizing policy control have on how carriers handle the processes?
Raleigh: The operators who will win in the future are those that will be the fastest to respond to market opportunities with relevant, compelling offers and value propositions. Reducing time-to-market from months and years to days also frees mobile operator marketing teams to follow models more commonly seen with over-the-top players. That is, launch quickly, gauge consumer response and quickly refine the offering to optimize its attractiveness and profitability. This is the type of process change ItsOn enables for our customers.
In fact, virtualizing the policy plane dramatically speeds up the process of designing and delivering new services for a mobile operator. It also dramatically increases the types of services that a mobile operator can offer. When the ItsOn platform extends the policy plane to include “user interaction policy,” the entire user experience is transformed. This is why we developed our Service Design Center system. Through this user-friendly high level interface, we make it simple for a mobile operator’s personnel to design and deploy new service policies and service pricing. It then translates these service plan designs into the correct network policy plane controls, and automatically orchestrates the provisioning and ongoing real-time management of the policy plane controls required to implement these new service plans.
RCRWN: Are internal employees still handling changes to policy control or have they been outsourced to virtual policy control vendors?
Raleigh: In our model, the operator is completely in charge of executing their own policies. We don’t believe in charging heavy ongoing professional service fees to implement new policies using the ItsOn platform. We provide operator employees with a single Web portal where they manage the entire end-to-end service design. So, in this one place, they can define the detailed policies, charging rules, pricing, notifications, triggers, look and feel and how the plan is displayed to the end-user on their device catalog – all within minutes.
RCRWN: What is the financial impact for carriers looking to virtualize policy control?
The benefits are two-fold. There is significant revenue upside that stems from growing volume by going after specific market segments with targeted propositions, increasing average revenue per user by facilitating the transition from feature phones to smart phones with on-ramp plans and complete customer cost control.
Raleigh: The other side of the coin is the financial impact of dramatically reducing operators’ capital and operating expenditures.
RCRWN: So, are you telling us that the move to virtualizing policy control functions is being driven by savings in capex or opex?
Raleigh: ItsOn policy control virtualization brings major cost savings in both capex and opex. Capex savings are driven by the fact that in our architecture, operators can extend their policy control all the way to the edge of the network and employ the “free” device CPU to perform functions typically handled by expensive network elements, all with better context than ever before over what the user is actually doing.
On the opex side, there are tremendous savings to be had by enabling customer self-care right on the device. This is especially true for those tasks that consumers most commonly call support for, like adding voice minutes, blocks of text messages or additional data to their existing plan. In addition, operators can now focus their resources on quickly innovating and iterating on the optimal offer set rather than spending months and money designing, testing and configuring just one plan via traditional systems.
Another operator benefit is network cost reduction. ItsOn’s Smart Service policy controls provide application aware traffic controls to help reduce congestion and reduce roaming costs. On a typical mobile data network, 30% to 45% of the data usage at peak hours is from applications running in the background. Since this traffic does not benefit the real-time user experience, it can be time-shifted to when the network is not as busy, thus offering a far better user experience. Application-aware Smart Service controls can also be employed to greatly reduce data roaming traffic, saving cost for subscribers and operators investing less on hardware and backhaul.