Policy and charging are far from becoming monolithic, over-mature market segments. Not hardly. The best opportunities for policy are still emerging.
It's quite remarkable to think what's happened in the realm of policy and charging in the last year:
- AT&T was the first to end their flat-rate, unlimited data plans for mobile devices, followed closely by O2, Hutchison and Vodafone.
- Verizon launched their 4G LTE network with tiered pricing for the new service.
- Mobile data consumption growth rates across all global markets continued to increase exponentially: China Mobile is seeing upwards of 600% increase in mobile data service use; AT&T is tracking upwards of 3,000% growth in mobile data over the last three years.
Last year at about this time, policy and real-time charging were not really a mystery, but the market has certainly exploded in the last 12-18 months. As Ray le Maistre at
Light Reading notes, that growth is right in line with the increasing demand in mobile data being seen everywhere. The result is that the policy market, according to research group Infonetics, is expected to reach $1.6 billion by 2015, a more than 300% rise from its current size.
So there's no doubt that big data has led to big growth for policy and charging. And that growth has been accompanied by an understandable maturation of the market, defined most tangibly by real changes in pricing models among operators.
But this is not to say the market is stagnating. Not hardly. The best opportunities for policy are still emerging. As data is infused in to more and more things from energy grids to transportation to supply chains, policy will find new uses in these areas. The idea that your car could automatically reroute you around heavily polluted urban areas to reduce smog and improve air quality, or that your home's energy use could be lowered if your microwave could temporarily share power with your refrigerator, requires intelligence and automated rules enforcement be built in to these everyday technologies. That requires policy.
And communications operators aren't done with policy's applications either. Data buckets, the idea that subscriber can purchase a chunk of data and tap in to it from any of their many devices rather than needing separate plans for their phone, laptop or home connections, is one that Sprint CEO Dan Hesse recently said was probably the non-flat-rate pricing idea that subscribers would be most interested in.
And it's not only around charging aspects where policy gets interesting. At the Wireless Influencers conference in Carlsbad, CA a couple of months ago, I learned about the rapid advances in mobile connectivity to collect real time data from personal heart rate, blood pressure and glucose monitors. If ever there was an application that required guaranteed QoS, that is one of them. I am watching with interest to see how these kinds of applications play off against the net neutrality debate. I hope sense will prevail and these applications do get to see the light of day. It would be a great shame to see them fail because of net neutrality constraints. There is certainly a policy management requirement here should they prevail.
And over-the-top players continue to present a problem for operators hoping to reap incremental revenues from all this new traffic. The once-failed idea, at least in wireline markets, of operators charging content providers a premium for sending material over operators' pipes, is now being floated in mobile circles again, according to a
GigaOM article. This may still prove to not be the most popular route, and operators may need to concentrate more than ever on new pricing schemes for mobile data to make sure they don't run in to more network congestion problems.
Policy and charging are far from becoming monolithic, over-mature market segments. 2011 should be another remarkable year.
Happy holidays and a wonderful New Year everyone!
