Policy: Increasingly Important to Get Right

15 September 2010

Policy is a theme to which we shall return on an increasingly frequent basis, as the topic of policy management seems certain to become one of the hot issues of the year. It seems that the notion of free and unlimited bandwidth may finally be grinding to a halt. Of course, it's never been free, as anyone who has paid €25 for Wi-Fi access in a hotel can tell you. But, it's the policing of this usage and the way in which it can be monetised in creative ways that is going to be important. Fair usage, bill shock and that kind of thing is one issue, but the real money is going to reside in two directions.

First, in the delivery of real time differentiated policies according to who pays and the agreed SLA. Secondly, in the way in which policy control can be offered to third party application vendors as a capability alongside other application enablers such as location and voice. Policy can really be an asset here and we suspect that the real innovation for cashing in on policy will come from this domain: i.e. not from operators themselves, but from the third parties accessing their networks. The challenge for service providers is to make sure they have an infrastructure in place that will enable exposure of policy control in this way. Will this happen in 2010?