I need a new kind of service from you – a premium quality Wi-Fi service.

Everybody loves Wi-Fi. We already have it at home; we use it to connect to Internet over our DSL or cable. We let our friends share our home Wi-Fi, too. We access it on the go, using it at many public Wi-Fi hotspots. It works everywhere, and most of the time this public Wi-Fi is free. Or is it?

We all glance far too quickly over terms and conditions and click “yes” on Wi-Fi signup pages, just to get “free” Wi-Fi access. Sometimes, a password is not even required.

So what exactly do we get with public Wi-Fi today?

Most of the time, we get basic Internet access, often slow, with no guarantees on quality of service – and very often public Wi-Fi hotpots are heavily congested. Attend any major sports event or a concert or a business conference and you will know how bad this can get. There is little or no security.

When we pay for it – by the hour, or when using a daily pass (in hotels, for example), we may still get charged multiple times for our connected Wi-Fi devices (read the fine print). Our content may be “in the cloud”, but the terms and conditions may prevent us from accessing our Pandora or Spotify account, and not allow us to download the latest application update from the app store.

We – your subscribers – are at the point when we need a reliable and trusted public Wi-Fi service, delivered from you, our service provider, someone we trust the most when it comes to delivery of our communication services.

We need a new kind of Wi-Fi:

• We need secure, high-quality Wi-Fi connectivity, with guaranteed QoS and improved experience.
• We need freedom to add more devices to our plan, and flexibility to share our quota across several Wi-Fi devices or across cellular and Wi-Fi devices.
• We need access to our cloud content anytime, anywhere – and yes, that includes Wi-Fi.
• We want to be able to purchase a weekend pass when we are in Paris and not worry about our high roaming cellular bill.
• We want to enjoy Wi-Fi roaming and get these charges automatically on our “one bill” from you.

So, dear service provider, are you listening?

If you are looking at the Wi-Fi landscape, things may look pretty hectic. Too many offers and a lot of them “free”, so it may look hard to compete. With the almost exponential growth of users of users, their connected devices and associated data traffic volumes, as well as with the increased demand for Wi-Fi connectivity everywhere, you may have the strange feeling that someone else is “eating your Wi-Fi lunch” and stealing your customers. You want to get into this Wi-Fi business, but you are not certain of your business plan, ROI, rollout schedules, competitiveness. What is worse, many solution vendors are offering to help you by installing a whole new infrastructure overlay for Wi-Fi, including separate subscription management.

There is a carrier grade Wi-Fi solution for you. 

I work for Amdocs, where we have been expanding our leading product portfolio and wide-range of proven services to enable enable service providers like you to leverage their brand, customer relationships, operations, network and data – to simplify the customer experience, harness and capitalize on the data explosion, stay ahead with new digital services and improve operational efficiency.

Amdocs has released a carrier-grade Wi-Fi control and monetization solution for mobile, fixed and converged operators that lets you build upon your existing network infrastructure (existing Wi-Fi access points and controllers, WLAN gateways, mobile packet core, cable MSO equipment). With the Amdocs Wi-Fi Experience Solution, you can leverage your assets, including customer subscription databases, OSS/BSS and payment systems – and manage Wi-Fi not just as an access technology, but also as a foundation for new and innovative services, which you can roll out quickly and use your existing customer base as a start for further monetization.

I hope you are reading this, because I am not alone in this wish for a new kind of public Wi-Fi – delivered as a service from you.

I was there, to get connectivity from you  – from early days of using a “1 Meg modem” (early DSL) to using DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem; I was your early adopter for 3G, HSPA+  and LTE.

In our home, we have many connected devices, almost all of them supporting Wi-Fi, and a growing number of them being mobile (several smartphones and tablets).

But, I am tired of using unsecure public hotspots, I am tired of entering my password into the web form on my browser (on my smartphone or a tablet) so many times just to get basic connectivity.

I am frustrated for not being able to use Wi-Fi the same way I use my cellular connectivity – home and abroad.

I would really welcome the opportunity to use both Wi-Fi and cellular – to get premium wireless services with improved quality and expanded coverage, and with a reasonable price for roaming.

I am willing to pay for this premium Wi-Fi, delivered by you, as a part of my service bundle.

There are many others like me who need improved Wi-Fi, not just for basic Internet connectivity, but also for accessing their cloud content and expanding the scope of their business reach.

So, please talk to Amdocs to learn how you can deliver this new kind of Wi-Fi, while leveraging as much as you can from your existing infrastructure.

Amdocs can help you roll it out in a matter of months.

I am willing to wait that long.

Thank you.

Alex Pavlovic

There’s a lot of chatter around virtualization and elastic solutions lately, but what does it mean? Is there value for service providers beyond lowering operational costs? Can Network Function Virtualization (NFV) “stretch” data service offerings and increase ROI?

Thankfully the “cloud” of confusion around NFV is beginning to dissipate as service providers realize the value in virtualizing control-plane applications – PCRF, HSS and subscriber databases – goes well beyond hardware cost savings. Software-centric core networks provide greater service agility and enable service providers to quickly extend data service offerings around more market opportunities.

When evaluating NFV, service providers must consider the service opportunities and new use-cases enabled by virtualizing the control-plane functions. In the past, services would be introduced on a network-wide basis and require additional hardware or upgrades, but with NFV networks can be expanded virtually to add more capacity and rapidly scaled up or down to support performance requirements on any hardware.

Elastic PCRF, one core element of the virtualized control plane, can quickly and efficiently stretch data services through application-specific policies tailored to new markets and business models. And that translates to faster time to market and more service innovation for a greater return on investment.

What’s your strategy for NFV? Are there plans to “stretch” your services to new markets? If you’re interested in learning more about how to leverage control plane virtualization and extend data services, register for a free live webinar from Light Reading and Amdocs on Wednesday, May 8:
Extend Data Services with Elastic PCRF: How Control Plane Virtualization Enables New Business Models

Service provider Wi-Fi – preventative medicine or vitamin boost?

We recently surveyed more than 30 global operators, and asked operators to rank the top three objectives for leveraging Wi-Fi in their future growth strategies. 40% identified service differentiation as their number one objective; with 30% identifying data offload as their top objective. If we had conducted the same survey a year ago, it’s highly likely that data offload would have resoundingly been cited as the main objective.

It’s clear that offload still remains very important to operators as it delivers medicinal value in relieving congested mobile broadband networks. However, service providers are now attaching increased significance to Wi-Fi as a service differentiator – in which it acts as a vitamin to deliver a boost in terms of incremental value to their customers and incremental monetization opportunities for service providers.

Here’s why: Analysys Mason estimates that handset Wi-Fi usage will rise from about 55% to more than 60% of overall traffic in the next few years. Tablet Wi-Fi usage will remain constant at more than 80% of traffic. The message is clear – ignore Wi-Fi at your peril as your customers will spend the majority of time on Wi-Fi vs. mobile.

So, is service provider Wi-Fi a medicine or a vitamin? Frankly it’s both, with service differentiation poised to tip the balance in the coming 12-18 months.

While operators are embracing Wi-Fi as a natural network extension, they will also offer new types of Wi-Fi services to provide a differentiated premium experience  with assured speeds, limited access, and quality of service. This is just one example of how operators will embrace Wi-Fi as a vitamin to boost their wireless growth strategies.

We decided to investigate, and in a series of 140 video interviews, across 17 countries, we talked to real consumers of all ages and socio-economic groups to hear about their mobile data use, experience and what they thought of the service they were getting from their provider.

Watching the videos of people from Venezuela to Australia talking about their data usage, bill-shock fears, and hearing about their expectations and, in some cases, misconceptions, led me to the conclusion that users all around the world are eager to tell us about their data needs; our job is to meet them.

For a small taste of what they had to say, take a look at this video, and join us at the Amdocs InTouch Business Forum in Miami for a detailed discussion of the findings at the Revenue Management Summit.

For those of you who can’t wait for the summit, here’s a couple of key takeaways:

- Users today want to feel in control of their data.  While almost half of our interviewees said they would be prepared to pay more for an unlimited plan, drilling down into their answers it becomes clear that what they really want and need is an “Unlimited for Me” plan – a personalized data plan that meets their specific needs.

- Almost half of our interviewees felt their data experience was not quick enough, so operators investing in 4G roll outs are definitely making the right move. People will pay for a better quality of service, and if you can get them to value the experience, there’s a great opportunity to sell ‒ and monetize ‒ more data, to existing and new users.

Due to the extremely competitive environment for a share of the data services pie, operators need every advantage they can get. At Amdocs we believe an integrated policy and charging system will give them this edge. It will help them get to market quickly with  innovative data services and targeted offers and having a tightly  integrated system that combines usage metering and policy control with monetary balance management  will help service providers in the quest to offer the best possible data experience to all their users.

The Amdocs Data Experience Solution comes with eight popular pre-integrated market offers that get new services out in the market in a matter of months. These market offers come pre-configured but can also be customized to meet the unique of individual service providers based on their regional markets.

An integrated system not only gets services to market faster – it also significantly reduces network and IT integration costs.

These are just a few reasons why Amdocs believes in a system approach to help operators redefine their users data experience.

By Teresa Cottam, Research and Publications Director at Telesperience

In less than eight months the Olympic flame will reach London, marking the start of the XXX Olympiad. However, it’s not just the athletes that need to reach a peak of performance in time for the Games. Communications service providers (CSPs) – both fixed, mobile and broadband – face enormous challenges on so many levels in order to cope with increases in traffic, as well as maximizing the opportunities presented.

This event is a milestone in communications evolution: the first m-Olympiad.  The first time that the majority of UK citizens, visitors and athletes will be equipped with “performance-enhancing” smart phones.

Why is this important? Well we know that smart phones change the way customers behave: Ofcom recently revealed research that showed smart phone customers leave their phone on longer, use it more and they say they are “more addicted” to their phone. In case you hadn’t noticed, manufacturers have also begun incorporating fantastic cameras from the likes of Zeiss and Olympus into these phones, which enable visitors to not only take pictures or video of themselves outside Buckingham Palace, of Tom Daly’s dives, or even of their hotel room, but to upload these to Facebook or send them to everyone they know. Some estimates say that watching and sharing video and pictures – both professional footage and user-generated – will make up around 80% of the traffic volume expected during the Games.

The problem is that UK CSPs have two seemingly conflicting challenges. The first is that they need to maintain network quality in the face of what could be unpredictable and unprecedented demand in order to protect their brand values. The second is that they need to optimise the revenue-generating and brand-enhancing opportunities presented. Currently, they are very much focused on the first of these challenges, and to a large extent their approach is defensive and network-centric. However, if they can think more strategically and use the right BSS approach then these challenges do not have to be contradictory or conflicting – in fact they can deliver against both.

To understand how this can work let’s consider roaming as an example. During July to early August 2012 over one million extra visitors (or as we like to call them “roamers”) will appear on UK networks – largely in the South East. CSPs can wait and see what happens and try to attract some of this business in the traditional manner by luring them with a strong signal at ports and airports. Or they could try something different.

There’s a great opportunity to target these roamers with special Olympic service plans before they reach the UK – of course that means working proactively with partner CSPs to do this. These service plans can be carefully designed to offer the certainty that roamers desire – including controls, advice to help prevent billshock, and suitable tariffs – along with a package of services that follow the Olympic theme and cater to the needs of international visitors. At the same time, these service plans can help to deliver more predictability to CSPs since they will know how many visitors have signed up to them and what their likely usage will be, and CSPs can use this insight to design and manage capacity, while also using the design of the plans to proactively shape traffic and flatten usage peaks.

Let me explain how this could work. The UK busy period is between 6pm and 9pm in the evening (local). However, the best time for roamers to call home or to upload video may be later than this – the US, for example, is +5 hours to +8 hours behind the UK. This means 6pm on the East Coast is 11pm UK local. Encouraging US roamers to call home after 11pm GMT by offering cheaper tariffs to the US between 11pm GMT and 8am GMT would help take the strain off the networks during the busiest hours in the UK, but also meets the needs of US roamers. Offering different tariffs for uploading movies and photos according to the time of day, or the load on the network, makes both operational and commercial sense. The ability to offer a choice of rates and premium services such as “bandwidth boosts” or higher levels of QoS will also appeal to some customers, while linking charges more closely to the capacity required to deliver them. It’s important to remember that in the UK, differentiated QoS is not so controversial as in the US, since it’s associated primarily with customer choice – something we’re pretty keen on over here.

Services can also be used to a similar effect. Bundling SMS or MMS into the service plan, or offering cheaper downloading or uploading between 11pm-8am can help manage traffic (as SMSCs can store SMS during heavy load periods) and proactively shift some of it to offpeak periods, while also delighting customers with cheaper tariffs.

In short, there is so much we can do. The technology is already available to do it, including of course policy and charging. The question is do we have the vision to move from being so defensive and, as we say here in the UK, on “the back foot”, to being proactive and “putting our best foot forward”. Only by tackling this opportunity in a positive manner will we both defend and optimize our brands and the opportunity presented. The Canadian Olympian Clara Hughes once said: “If you dream and you allow yourself to dream you can do anything.” That’s the real Olympic challenge for CSPs both inside and outside the UK: will they passively accept the opportunities provided by the Olympics or can they “dream” big enough thoughts to accelerate and optimize these opportunities? Is a bronze medal good enough for them, or will they take the chance to go for gold?

Director, Solutions and Product Marketing

Consumer and business users have never had so much choice today – cool smart devices, many different data plans.  Let’s face it; many of us now have multiple devices – dongle, smartphone and tablet – this is quickly becoming the norm in some markets.  And of course, let’s not forget – choice in service provider.   Hotly contested markets, the drive for subscriber acquisition, and customer loyalty – these are all key concerns for today’s CSPs.

The data experience is fast becoming a key battleground for differentiation.  This is a subset of the overall customer experience,  but focused on what happens when a user is on the network, how quickly they get access, speed of which applications are delivered ,  quality of the experience and dynamic offers that are delivered when they are needed most!  At a pending usage breach, when roaming, when trying to download a movie.

Customers don’t buy a data plan, they buy a data experience and one that is now as personal as their device.  How that data experience is delivered and managed by the CSP– in a personalized manner – is critical. 

Consider the opportunity in creating high targeted consumer and business user propositions.  There is strong interest in creating targeted propositions or data experiences.  For say  the mobile sports user who wants constant access to a set of specific streaming media applications but perhaps only at weekends or evenings with unmetered  access during those times, and at a guaranteed quality of service.  Or the business user who wants credit on his 3G account, when he uses WiFi out of the office.  Finally, the budget conscious first time smartphone user, who wants a base plan with opportunities for 1 time QoS boosts, to improve his experience when he chooses (and when he needs it) , vs. paying for this as part of his regular monthly plan. And with notifications when he reaches an impending usage threshold – all designed to give him what he needs, and when he needs it.

Interesting but complex!  This is where integrated policy and charging come into play.  Being able to create and deliver complex but targeted consumer and business propositions, and leverage these based on some key dynamic parameters – time, volume, application type, monetary options, and usage thresholds – that can all be managed in real time.  These technologies provide the tools to create these dynamic data experiences.

Visit the Data Experience Showcase at www.dataexperiencesolution.com to learn more about how Amdocs can help you redefine the data experience!

Directing Analyst, Next Gen OSS and Policy

What’s all the buzz about policy management? After all, it’s nothing new—policy has been around for years as a tool to enable traffic prioritization, particularly among cable operators looking to better manage broadband usage. Why, then, has it become such a hot topic in the industry, with operators spending over $400M on policy management solutions in 2010, and spurred such significant M&A activity, including Amdocs’ acquisition of Bridgewater Systems earlier this year?

Quite simply, this next generation of policy management is a different animal, and it differs from first-generation policy management in many ways. For one thing, it’s network-independent, enabling the operator to make policy decisions across access networks, both fixed and mobile. The current iteration of policy is dynamic and real-time, as opposed to the more static solutions of the past, and it’s multi-dimensional, meaning the operator can incorporate multiple inputs into a policy decisions—for example, combining time of day with content type and device type to determine whether a teenager has access to a certain service under a parental control offering.

Perhaps most importantly, next-generation policy management doesn’t operate in a bubble, but is closely integrated with related solutions. Over the last few years, we have seen policy increasingly deployed hand-in-hand with adjacent functionality, including policy enforcement, subscriber data management, and real-time charging, and that trend has only intensified as operators recognize the value provided by these integrated offerings. In fact, in a very recent operator survey published by Infonetics, we asked respondents to identify the systems their policy management solution integrates with or will in the future, and the results conveyed a very clear message: 96% of respondents named subscriber data management, 83% traffic inspection, and 75% billing and charging. The integration of these functional areas enables policy management to act as a central control point for subscriber, service, and network information reconciliation, which then opens the door for more targeted and innovative loyalty programs, payment options, and value-added services, as well as better network utilization.

As this concept of next-generation policy management continues to evolve, I believe the supplier landscape will evolve as well, to the point that vendors will be at a significant disadvantage if they lack a policy management solution that takes adjacent functionality into account. Policy may have once been a network function, with investments made by network operations departments, but as operators increasingly view policy management as an enabler for new services and capabilities, as opposed to a tool for traffic management, the nature of policy deployments is changing, as are the decision makers behind policy investments. The first generation of policy is rapidly disappearing, and vendors that don’t understand this next generation of policy management, including how it interrelates with adjacent functionality, risk disappearing as well.

As data services become more common and are being used by a growing number of subscribers we see an increasing number of service providers moving away from all you can eat (unlimited) plans to offer tiered pricing plans. So essentially instead of having a $30 all you can eat data plan, subscribers will need to choose the right amount of data they want to use and that will come with a price tag. If they’re using a lot of wireless data they will pay accordingly.

The idea does have merit as it would make sense for heavy data users to pay more than the average data consumer. The notion of one price for all creates a situation where most of the network resources are being consumed by a small percentage of users and yet everyone pays the same although the resources are not shared equally.

But moving from an unlimited all you can eat plan to tiered pricing plans is not a simple process. Other than the technical aspects which involve a tight integration between charging and policy control, there’s a somewhat disregarded aspect of a customer experience.

When seeking to introduce a new business monetization models, service providers must not forget to take their subscribers along for the journey. It’s not just about convincing subscribers to let go of their simple-to-understand, all-inclusive data plans. Instead, it’s about making sure they don’t drop out in the process of migrating, and that they have a consistently satisfying customer experience throughout.

For subscribers used to unlimited plans, the perceived value is less about what they do or don’t do with the bandwidth they receive at a fixed price, and more about not having to worry about crossing invisible quota lines – and then being charged extra.

To get them off the unlimited mindset, service providers must devise easy-to-understand pricing schemes and implement better visibility and control mechanisms to enable those subscribers to be aware of their data usage, how much they’re spending and advise them in real-time when they are about to reach the boundaries of the  data plan they have opted for.

Implementing these mechanisms will facilitate a smoother transition from unlimited to tiered pricing plans and improve customer experience aspects when offering these plans. It could also be harnessed for some creating marketing promotions as it enables service providers to communicate in real-time with their postpaid customers.

Upsell offers, that’s how.

Service providers can capitalize on this new market dynamic by offering their subscribers targeted upsell options for data usage in real-time. These could include:

• Upgrades to a higher data plan – offered when subscribers consistently reach or exceed their data limits
• Speed boost – temporary boost in bandwidth to ensure a smooth video viewing session
• Try-before-you-buy promotions – allowing users to preview a service before they sign up for a monthly plan

Upsell services offer users convenient access to temporary service upgrades, providing an enhanced and personalized subscriber data experience, specifically tailored to meet their unique needs.

Join me today at 11am EST for a live chat session in the Data Experience Showcase Lounge where we can talk more about how you can implement upsell offers to increase ARPU.

And don’t forget to tweet about the Data Expereience Solution at #DESLaunch for a chance to win a Motorola Xoom tablet!