Customer profile
Our customer was a major Central European mobile operator offering voice services (voice calls, video calls and voice access to email and SMS) and non-voice services (internet access and monitoring, telemetry and monitoring, information and entertainment services) for both individuals and business customers. The operator accounted for approximately 30% of the national market and served over 13 million post-paid and pre paid subscribers, his data services being available via 2G/3G, CDMA and LTE networks.
Business challenge
The operator wanted to implement an access network agnostic policy management solution that would enable him to:
- launch innovative, flexible offerings for data services
- optimize the utilization of his existing network capacity through effective bandwidth management
- ensure fair usage in an adaptive, real-time manner
- gain a better insight into the subscribers’ usage behavior patterns to ensure prompt response to arising demands and take advantage of new business opportunities
R Systems contribution and solution
The operator has chosen R Systems for the implementation of his policy management platform of choice. R Systems offered an ultimately flexible and scalable platform that included as key and complementary components:
- Bridgewater Systems’ (acquired by Amdocs in 2011) policy controller with highly extensible and flexible policy rules engine that allows making policy decisions on per-subscriber, per-session basis
- Sandvine’spolicy traffic switches responsible for inspecting and shaping the traffic to effectively enforce application aware policy rules
- Sandvine’s subscriber policy broker which keeps track of the subscriber identity mapping and collects statistical data to provide rich reporting and analytical capabilities.
As the prime contractor, R Systems was responsible for leading the joint project team and for the end-to-end delivery of the project, from proof of concept, contract negotiations, solution architecture design, software and hardware delivery, installation and configuration, detailed requirements analysis, configurations and customizations of DPI-PCRF products, implementation of policy rules, development of custom components, project management, platform integration with the operator’s BSS/OSS systems, site preparation, testing, 24/7 offsite & onsite support, training and support for the preparation of acceptance tests.
The platform supported 2G/3G and CDMA post paid customers, including the shared wallet functionality for the dual offer, while the LTE subscribers integration had also been implemented.
Benefits
The policy management solution provided the operator significant benefits such as:
- rapid deployment of new and innovative policy rules into the network through highly configurable rules engine;
- optimization of network costs through effective bandwidth utilization and management;
- fair usage in an adaptive, real-time manner;
- advanced adaptive dynamic policy capabilities allowing an enormous flexibility in specifying and enforcing policy across the network;
- future proof platform for intelligently and proactively managing network resources, as well as applications, and subscribers in real-time while generating revenue from personalized mobile applications, content and services;
- proven carrier-grade, ultimately scalable, redundant platform providing a highly resilient solution;
- established roadmap and evolution path to 4G/LTE and for policy convergence across all access technologies.