The 3Ps for LTE Success: Profitability, Personalization and PCRF

LTE deployments continue to grow rapidly, over 320 deployments have been completed worldwide, and many operators are running LTE tests. LTE is gaining popularity and soon becoming a preferred choice for operators due to its low cost per bit and greater efficiency. However, this soaring demand for LTE does not guarantee soaring revenues for mobile operators and the biggest challenge for operators remain to get the subscriber spend more for more speed. To address this challenge, they need to have the right tools at their disposal – the 3Ps of Profitability, Personalization and PCRF. LTE spectrum licenses cost operators dearly, hence Profitability is paramount for operators and they must figure out ways for monetizing their investments. Increasing profitability requires delivering a positive customer experience, innovative personalized services and managing network cost.  While Profitability and Personalization are crucial neither of these can be achieved without PCRF. Policy control empowers the operator, with the flexibility and time to market advantage required to improve customer experience and satisfaction based on greater personalization, choice and spending control. PCRF enables operators to dynamically control network resources with real-time policies based on service, subscriber, or usage context. It enables dynamic allocation of bandwidth, Quality-of-service (QoS) and Bill shock notifications, novel offers such as unlimited night time offer or application specific plans or bundled plans, thus it personalizes user experience while increasing revenue opportunities for operators. While most operators may have deployed a PCRF for their 3G network but they need to check its flexibility and ease of integration with charging over standard based Sy interface for new monetization and personalization use cases, such as Tiered Services, Shared Wallet, Turbo Boost etc. Network based PCRF offers very less flexibility. To capitalize on real-time intelligence, customer insight and innovate in LTE, operators need a next generation dynamic PCRF. In a highly competitive mobile broadband market this can mean the difference between gaining the first mover advantage and winning or falling behind the competition and losing with existing business models. A right PCRF can enable service providers to make real- time, session-aware policy decisions over subscriber access to network resources based on usage patterns, preferences, speed, time, applications type, etc. It helps operators to not just control subscriber entitlement and LTE network resources, but to charge for that control with an integrated framework of real-time policy management and charging. This framework enables operators to offer innovative, convenient, and flexible ways for subscribers to buy and use their services, such as on-demand services, real- time upgrades, service passes, etc. With such tools operators can charge on a real-time basis for QoS upgrade, bandwidth upgrade or offer ‘pay as you go’ for roaming customers without having to face the challenge of going through sign up for monthly plans. NetVertex PCRF enables operators reduce subscriber churn, the cost associated with non business data traffic and harness to increase effectiveness through monitoring subscriber usage pattern, network contention, manage bandwidth and enabling usage based charging, meeting operator objective of 3Ps for LTE success.