Category Archives: Policy Control

What is it that you do?

I’m asked this question surprisingly often, “Alan, what is it that you do?” My stock answer is, “I wander the world helping people.” Which generally results in a wry smile from those who know me; else a questioning or annoyed look from someone who was expecting a straightforward answer to a straightforward question. When I […]

BBWF 2013: History keeps repeating itself…

Better late than never, I’ve finally got around to the BBWF (Broadband World Forum) summary.  No 2014 trends weblog this year, its simply become too passé.  I’ll likely do something in the summer on trends. BBWF is a great litmus test across the whole of the telecom industry.  This year the theme that hit me […]

Mobile Broadband Use is Changing, Policy Needs to Catch Up. Summary of Policy Control and Data Pricing Conference, April 2013

The Policy Control and Data Pricing Conference took place between the 16-17th April.  Its a ‘who’s who’ of Policy Control and Charging (PCC), and provides a great litmus test on the state of industry.  The discussions this year were quite frank with open disagreements; the worry of signalling storms appeared to have abated. Reviewing the […]

Policy Control and Data Pricing Conference: Pre-Conference Workshop Review, 15th-17th April 2013, Berlin

I’ve been having fun over the past couple of weeks putting the pre-conference workshop together for the Policy Control and Data Pricing Conference, entitled “Policy Control and Charging Workshop: An Independent and Quantified Review.”  Its been an interesting extercise to review what was predicted through 2012 and what actually happened. Global mobile data traffic grew […]

Policy Control and Data Pricing Conference: Moving the Discussion from What’s Possible to What’s Working, 15th-17th April 2013, Berlin

Now in its third year, the Policy Control and Data Pricing Conference has followed the progress of policy in the industry, in the first year the focus was ‘what is policy’, last year focused on ‘how do you deploy policy’, and this year ‘how do you make / save money with policy’.  This year’s focus […]

End of 2012 Entry: An Eventful and Noisy Year

In this end of year article I’ll review 2012 and look at a few of the things coming up in 2013.  2012 has been an eventful year, we tend to miss how eventful as we’re busy working and raising our families (a life-long commitment!).  The year opened with some operators finally admitting revenues are in […]

Policy Control and Charging Conference Summary

The Policy Control and Real-Time Charging Conference ran from the 24th-26th April 2012 at the Krasnapolsky Hotel, Amsterdam.  The conference included operator presentations / case studies from Swisscom, Reliance, Turkcell, Vodafone, KPN, and Orange.  I ran a post-conference workshop on the 26th April entitled “Policy Control and Charging Workshop: An Independent and Quantified Review,” the […]

Is QoS Monetizable for Consumer Services?

We’re seeing lots of wishful thinking in the industry around being able to monetize QoS (Quality of Service) for consumer services.  In part its coming from the current LTE (Long Term Evolution) sales push, which has an overly complex set of QoS capabilities given the limitations of the air interface.  As well as the summer […]

Policy Management in Telecommunication Networks: Are the standards bodies making it too complex?

Policy management has been a topic of discussion in telecom networks for over a decade.  The focus of this article is on policy management and consumer services/networks.  Policy management appears in the PDF (Policy Decision Function) of the 3GPP IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) specifications, within many SDP (Service Delivery Platform) implementations, and a number of […]