To some extent we all still live in the shadow of the “fiber glut” created during the tech/Internet bubble of the late 1990s, that enormous overcapacity of long distance fiber trunks strung in the U.S. and everywhere during this time. However, just like our cyclical boom/bust economy, the fiber glut could finally become fiber scarcity. After all, Level 3 says that 50 percent to 60 percent of its IP backbone traffic is bandwidth-hungry video, as compared with what was traveling across the network about six years ago: 5 to 10 percent.

 

That’s probably why Openet (News - Alert), a leading provider of Transactional Intelligence for network service providers, has announced the launch of its Fair Usage solution. Based upon Openet’s FusionWorks Policy Manager and Convergent Charging products, the Fair Usage solution enables service providers to ensure profitability from their data services by enforcing limits on subscriber usage volume, while allowing subscribers to purchase additional volume when limits are reached.

 

Bandwidth becomes more valuable as it is consumed, and rich content by wireless and broadband Internet users can lead to some pretty amazing rates of consumption. With limited resources available to serve exponentially growing demand, service providers will ultimately have to ensure that all their subscribers are provided the expected network performance for which they pay. Operators now find that a small number of power users are accounting for increasingly larger volumes of network capacity — resulting in network congestion during peak hours. As a result, user experience is degraded, leading to increased churn and rising network costs.

 

Through the integration of Openet’s FusionWorks Policy Manager and Convergent Charging products — both built on a common platform, the FusionWorks Framework — service providers can reduce operating costs to manage the solution, and are able to source a comprehensive solution from a single vendor. Competing solutions require integration of policy and charging products from multiple vendors, which increases operating costs by duplicating system management functions.

 

Consumers growing appetite for bandwidth-heavy content and applications must be offset with a way to reinforce contract terms with service providers to prevent revenue loss, and offer consumers transparency for their own data usage. That’s why Openet launched its Fair Usage solution, which enables the establishment of fair usage policies capable of not only capturing potential lost cash, but which can also generate revenue by charging for additional bandwidth.

 

Thus, to meet service providers’ needs for regulating bandwidth, Openet’s Fair Usage solution has been formulated to identify high-volume usage over any time period, provide subscribers with visibility into their usage through a self-care website, as well as email and text message alerts prior to imposing usage limits and implement various escalation responses when limits are reached, such as reducing bandwidth or limiting specific types of services during peak hours. It also creates exception policies for high-value and loyal subscribers and can offer multiple options for subscribers to purchase additional volume including pay-per-use, usage bundles and service plan upgrades. Last but not least, the Fair Usage solution can generate reports on repeat violators to enable the service provider to take additional actions.

 

Hence, Openet’s Fair Usage solution enables service providers to once again exert considerable control over their networks, just like in the good old days.