Operators are constantly looking to increase their ARPU by rolling out new services. There is a need for balance between offering new personalized services to subscribers and ensuring that the services helps in maximizing revenues. To improve stability and efficiency, network operations have to be optimized. Torres Policy Control solution addresses and enables the operator to overcome these challenges.

Torres' solution for wireline operators provides end-to-end Policy Control comprised of Torres' Service Management Platform for policy and charging rules function (PCRF) and Torres' IP Service Flow Manager for policy control enforcement function (PCEF). The integrated PCRF and PCEF solution, a one-of-its-kind in the market, provides unique advantages in terms of new service rollouts, scalability, efficiency and cost. The solution has evolved from field tested products, currently serving a huge subscriber base of around seven million.

Wireless 3G (3GPP R7) Deployment Diagram

Fair use of Bandwidth

Mobile broadband networks enable subscribers to use their mobile broadband dongles and smart phones to watch movies, play games, share files and extensively use social networking sites.. This has an impact on the network bandwidth usage with HTTP traffic being predominant. Operators have to balance between providing bandwidth to their users for internet access and ensure that revenue generating services are prioritized and guaranteed bandwidth. Torres Policy Control helps operators make fair use of their bandwidth. Traffic prioritization and bandwidth management policies can be enforced in an intelligent manner that would control the internet access while ensuring QoS of critical services. The solution enables the operator to keep its subscribers well informed and in control of the policies being applied to their traffic.

 

Maximize Revenues

Subscribers use more of internet for gaming, video watching, movie downloads, social networking and file sharing. Each of these require different kind of browsing experience. While a 1 mbps connection is good for emails, even a 5mbps connection does not guarantee a good movie experience. So, different services require different level of QoS. Each of this require specialized packages to suit the subscribers needs.

Devices like palm tops, tablets and smart phones demand new way of billing and network operations for the operators. For example a mobile user may like to read a book, while another mobile user may like to play a game. Both of them do not require same amount of bandwidth. Further, a reading enthusiast will need a connection that has access to online libraries, online book stores and billing plans that gives access for few books, etc; while a gamer will need a connection that gives her access to gaming portals and subscriptions that will allow her to use the ‘mobile’ currency in gaming sites. All this would create explosion of data at the mobile terminals. Further, the terminals becoming more and more slimmer, smarter and light there would specific network points in the cloud which are bandwidth heavy, require large number of transactions and manage this data explosion. This creates an urge for operators to move up from providing plain vanilla bandwidth to a more valuable content enabler and go up the value chain. This means a whole new set of numerous rate plans, efficient management of these rate plans for new devices, new applications, and ever changing networks scenario. The policy control server should dynamically generate effective policies, co-ordinate with the rating and charging to ensure that the operator gets their revenue share from all the content providers and enables users to seamlessly access multiple such services. Torres SMP helps create the smart network required for such changing network scenarios.

 

Reduce Costs

To achieve overall efficiency, the operator requires a holistic view of the network in terms of services as well as subscribers. The Torres solution helps in network monitoring and provides visibility through near-real time as well as historic reports. Torres solutions provide intelligence at the edge by identifying high bandwidth users and peak load hours and provides this information to Torres SMP. With this information, Torres SMP can give which locations get peak load, or information about a user accessing heavy video downloads moving from one location to another. This helps in dynamically planning and allocating network resources, plan peak offload or create rate plans that will ensure the regular users do not suffer QoS issues when new users crowd a specific region. This helps in reducing costs of network operations and deployment.

Torres offload gateway is an innovative data path product, that ensures capex savings through its intelligent offload mechanisms, that diverts traffic directly to the core, by bypassing SGSN and GGSN. Torres solution helps make quick decisions on the data packets before they reach SGSN and offload them directly which reduces the significant spend on new purchases by 75%.

 

Minimize Churn

Torres Policy Control enables the operator to define user specific policies that control the QoS and QoE. The solution identifies subscribers as well as application flows and associates the two. A personalized billing cycle, a personalized roaming plan, a personalized gaming plan for a teenager subscriber will all help operators meet various expectation of a new age subscriber. Torres solutions help roll out various use cases and services that helps personalize services and hence to minimize churn.