Ericsson’s solution in this field is called Service-Aware Charging and Control (SACC). The competitiveness of the solution is recognized by independent research group Heavy Reading in a recent report, stating that Ericsson has “the most complete in-house policy solution among major vendors.” It has already been deployed in more than 90 networks around the world. 

The SACC solution analyzes the traffic carried over the network by means of deep packet inspection and heuristic analysis (similar to pattern recognition) and automatically identifies the types of data services being accessed.

Staffan Lindholm, head of SACC product management at Ericsson, says this provides operators with many charging options for mobile data services. “But more important, operators can decide which users, or types of data services, should be prioritized in case network resources become congested,” he says.

“This means operators can give heavy users a different quality-of-service depending on the traffic situation,” Lindholm says. “Otherwise, the traffic from a few heavy users, who might be file-sharing, can limit access for normal users who want to look up a webpage, send an e-mail, pay their bills and so on.”

Typically, 10 percent of the subscribers in a network account for 80 percent of the mobile data traffic. There are examples of users downloading as much as 200GB per month. Since flat rates are the most common charging model, operators gain little from investing in additional capacity unless it can be used to serve new subscribers.

Greger Blennerud, sales development director for mobile broadband at Ericsson, says operators need to implement fair usage policies.

“My message to operators is that unlimited flat rate is the charging model that gives the strongest growth,” he says. “But it should be combined with a fair usage clause, stating that if the user downloads more than for example 5GB in a month, their bandwidth can be restricted – but only when necessary, for example at peak hours in the evening. SACC is a key component that makes this possible.”

Peo Lehto, strategic product manager for SACC at Ericsson, says there is great interest from operators in addressing the issue.

“I would say the interest has really taken off this year,” he says. “We are getting requests specifically for policy control solutions. Previously, such requests were always part of a bigger scope.”

Lehto says large operators in particular are looking for end-to-end solutions that include policy control for the core as well as the radio network. “So far, Ericsson is one of the few vendors, if not the only one, that can offer this,” he says.

“We have also been asked to help operators using infrastructure from other vendors,” Lehto says. “Traffic management is a significant challenge for many operators at the moment. The importance of policy control will increase and Ericsson is in a very good position to provide the requested solutions.”