Openwave® Passport: Smart Policy

Mobile bandwidth is finite, so as demand continues to grow, charging the same flat rate to all mobile data subscribers regardless of data usage is not a sustainable business model. In the past six months, we have observed a shift in the market as more and more mobile service providers have either announced or rolled out tiered service plans.

To overcome the progressive and inevitable data-price erosion (as previously occurred in the voice and SMS business) and to align the value perceived by customers to the price of their data plan, mobile service providers are left with no alternative but to build advanced data pricing plans that are:

Personalized – offering relevance to the subscriber
Value-based – incorporating contextual aspects such as location, time and content dimensions, and point of interest promotions.
Transparent – keeping the subscriber notified as required (e.g. approaching or exceeding a price plan quota), and providing on-demand service self-care.

Openwave Passport offers a low-risk “trial and error” approach that gives service providers the flexibility to easily and quickly refine their pricing strategies to adapt and keep pace with market demand and competitors’ offerings. Passport provides the “gatekeeper” function that empowers mobile service providers to effectively manage and monetize the user experience as they move towards a more diverse and personalized tiered-service environment.

Passport Key Features

• Contextual and Proactive Subscriber Engagement: Depending on the conditions, context and purpose, Passport determines the best engagement channel (web interstitials, toolbar activation, SMS notification), and how to initiate the communication process with the subscriber.
• On-Demand Self-Care: Passport self-care ensures that subscribers are kept informed about the status of their service plans and are provided service upgrade or top-up options.
• A Launch Pad for New Service Introduction and Discovery: Passport can intelligently intercept mobile internet transactions in real-time based on predefined trigger criteria (e.g. URL, URL categories, subscriber or device profile data), targeting subscribers with relevant new services at the point of interest.
• Rich Tiered-Service Price Plan Definition: Passport helps service providers define their plans in terms of time and/or volume consumption, as well as QoS levels according to subscriber type, time of day/day or week, destination, traffic classification, device, location and network.
• Inline Charging: Service providers can bill the subscriber at the point of purchase and, optionally, check for sufficient funds before allowing a transaction to complete.
• Standards-based Policy Control Interfaces: Passport supports standard interfaces (Gx, Sp) in accordance with the associated 3GPP PCC specifications to enable interaction with centralized policy control functions (PCRF, SPR).

Passport: Smart Policy Edition

Openwave Passport can be enhanced with additional capabilities that provide traffic management, charging, policy control functions and service tiering. Openwave Passport: Smart Policy Edition is for service providers who have not already deployed a policy control and charging PCC infrastructure, or want to enhance their policy control capabilities, with minimum TCO, to bring contextual pricing models to their subscribers.

Key Features

• Subscriber Identification and Authentication: Identifies and authenticates the subscriber over a wide range of networks and access technologies using industry-standard techniques.
• Data Volume Management: Managing data consumption per device type; per time of day (e.g. 1Gb monthly quota for peak times; 10 Gb monthly quota for off peak); per destination, URL and application including exemption; per subscriber or group of subscribers; per recurring time period (e.g. 1Gb per month quota); per traffic type (e.g. messaging, web browsing, video, etc.); per network access type (e.g. 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi, home, roaming network).
• Time Management: Monitoring and managing timed access per subscriber, including the capability to meter accumulated usage time.
• Real-Time Enforcement: Dynamic and in-session policy update and enforcement in response to bandwidth-sensitive or service provisioning events.
• High-Speed Logging: For service metering and analytics gathering purposes.
• Access Control: Enables the service provider to perform policy-driven, real-time access control to allow, block, redirect or rate limit the traffic per user; per URL, application and content category; per device; per network access type; per traffic type; per time of day; per elapsed time.