Procera Mobile Subscriber Experience for Dummies

These materials are © 20 2015 15 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any Any dissemination, distr ibution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.

Mobile Subscriber Experience Procera Networks Special Edition

by Cam Cullen and Keith Brody


Mobile Subscriber Experience For Dummies ®, Procera Networks Special Edition Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River St. Hoboken, NJ 07030‐5774 www.wiley.com

Copyright © 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the Publisher. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748‐6011, fax (201) 748‐6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. Trademarks: Wiley, Trademarks: Wiley, For Dummies, the Dummies Man logo, The Dummies Way, Dummies.com, Making Everything Easier, and related trade dress are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries, and may not be used without written permission. Procera Networks and the Procera Networks logo are trademarks of Procera Networks. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. LIMIT OF LIABILITY/DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY: THE PUBLISHER AND THE AUTHOR MAKE NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES WITH RESPECT TO THE ACCURACY OR COMPLETENESS OF THE CONTENTS OF THIS WORK AND SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION WARRANTIES OF FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. NO WARRANTY MAY BE CREATED OR EXTENDED BY SALES OR PROMOTIONAL MATERIALS. THE ADVICE AND STRATEGIES CONTAINED HEREIN MAY NOT BE SUITABLE FOR EVERY SITUATION. THIS WORK IS SOLD WITH THE UNDERSTANDING THAT THE PUBLISHER IS NOT ENGAGED IN RENDERING LEGAL, ACCOUNTING, OR OTHER PROFESSIONAL SERVICES. IF PROFESSIONAL ASSISTANCE IS REQUIRED, THE SERVICES OF A COMPETENT PROFESSIONAL PERSON SHOULD BE SOUGHT. NEITHER THE PUBLISHER NOR THE AUTHOR SHALL BE LIABLE FOR DAMAGES ARISING HEREFROM. THE FACT THAT AN ORGANIZATION OR WEBSITE IS REFERRED TO IN THIS WORK AS A CITATION AND/OR A POTENTIAL SOURCE OF FURTHER INFORMATION DOES NOT MEAN THAT THE AUTHOR OR THE PUBLISHER ENDORSES THE INFORMATION THE ORGANIZATION OR WEBSITE MAY PROVIDE OR RECOMMENDATIONS IT MAY MAKE. FURTHER, READERS SHOULD BE AWARE THAT INTERNET WEBSITES LISTED IN THIS WORK MAY HAVE CHANGED OR DISAPPEARED BETWEEN WHEN THIS WORK WAS WRITTEN AND WHEN IT IS READ. For general information on our other products and services, or how to create a custom For Dummies book for your business or organization, please contact our Business Development Department in the U.S. at 877‐409‐4177, contact [email protected], or visit www.wiley.com/go/custompub. For information about licensing the For Dummies brand for products or services, contact [email protected]. ISBN 978‐1‐119‐08117‐3 (pbk); ISBN 978‐1‐119‐08118‐0 (ebk) Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Publisher’s Acknowledgments Some of the people who helped bring this book to market include the following: Development Editor: Jennifer Editor: Jennifer Bingham

Melissa Cossell Project Coordinator: Coordinator: Melissa

Project Editor: Jennifer Editor: Jennifer Bingham

Special Help from Procera: Mike Kay and Alexander Havang

Acquisitions Editor: Amy Editor: Amy Fandrei Editorial Manager: Rev Manager: Rev Mengle Business Development Representative: Karen Representative: Karen Hattan


Table of Contents Introduction Introd uction ..................................... ................... .................................... .................. 1 About This Book ................................................. .................................................................. ....................... ...... 1 Icons Used in This Book.................................. ................................................... .......................... ......... 2 Beyond the Book .................................. ................................................... ................................... ..................... ... 2

Chap Chapte terr 1: Mob Mobil ile e Subs Subscr crib iber er Exp Exper erie ienc nce e Basi Basics cs . . . . . 3 The Subscriber Experience Battleground............................... ............................... 4 Loyalty and disruption.................................. ................................................... ................... 4 Retaining subscribers is a cash cow ............................. ............................. 5 Introducing Mobile Subscriber Experience Software............ 6 Truly understanding your subscribers ......................... ......................... 7 What mobile subscriber experience software can do ................................. ................................................... ........................... ......... 7 Meeting Subscriber Needs without Breaking the Bank......... 8

Chapter 2: Ga Gathering an and Analyzing Data . . . . . . . . . . . .11 Big Data Is Your Friend ................................... .................................................... ........................ ....... 11 Moving into Real Time............................ Time............................................. ................................. ................ 12 DPI: The Value of Intelligence................................. ................................................. ................ 13 Monetizing Your Data ................................ ................................................. .............................. ............. 16

Chapter 3: Intelligent Charging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17 .17 Intelligent Charging 101.......................... 101........................................... ................................. ................ 18 What to Look for in an Intelligent Charging Solution .......... 19 Service charging implementation implementation ................................ ................................ 19 Service velocity .................. ................................... .................................. ........................... .......... 20 Tiered charging .................. ................................... .................................. ........................... .......... 21 Zero-rating .................................. ................................................... ................................... .................... 21

Chapter 4: Congestion Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .23 .23 Congestion Management Management 101.................................. .................................................. ................ 24 Understanding congestion domains ........................... ........................... 24 RAN awareness ........................................... ............................................................ ................... .. 25 What to Look for in a Congestion Management Management Solution ... 26 Managing queues ................................ ................................................. ........................... .......... 27 Hierarchical management management................................... ............................................. .......... 27 Parallel queuing .......................................... ........................................................... ................... .. 28 Performance ............................................. .............................................................. ...................... ..... 28


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Mobile Subscriber Experience For Dummies

Chapter 5: Network Quality Assurance . . . . . . . . . . . . . .29 Network Quality Assurance 101 ............................................. 29 Active queue management ........................................... 30 Fairness: Democracy in the network........................... 30 What to Look for in a Network Quality Assurance Solution ................................................................................. 32 Managing queues ........................................................... 33 Fair usage ........................................................................ 33 Analytics and forecasting ............................................. 34 Usage management........................................................ 34

Chapter 6: Location, Location, Location . . . . . . . . . . . . .35 Location Awareness 101 ......................................................... 35 What to Look for in a Location Awareness Solution ........... 37 Location analytics.......................................................... 37 Congestion management .............................................. 38 Location-based service plans....................................... 38 Customer care visibility ................................................ 39 Crowd-sourced drive testing ........................................ 39

Chapter 7: Ten Wins for Subscriber Experience . . . . . .41 Happy Customers!.................................................................... 41 Save Your Bacon ...................................................................... 41 Know Your Subscribers .......................................................... 42 Save Your Customers Money ................................................. 42 Deliver a World-Class Network .............................................. 42 Differentiate Your Service Offerings ...................................... 42 Become Proactive, Not Just Reactive.................................... 42 Diagnose and Solve Customer Issues Quickly...................... 43 High-Value Customers Get High-Quality Service ................. 43 Great Data, Not Just Big Data ................................................. 43

These materials are © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distr ibution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.

Introduction

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obile phone subscribers today are personally and professionally reliant on their networks. Folks are increasingly aware of the options they have and are demanding always-on connectivity while refusing to tolerate any downtime or delays. In fact, a 2014 study by Nokia found that 41 percent of global customers think an operator must offer excellent network quality, even if it costs more to do so. Worryingly for the industry, the study also found that messaging and Internet service quality falls short of customer expectations in all markets — with 60 percent experiencing problems with mobile data and application usage. So it’s increasingly vital for operators to assure the quality of subscribers’ experiences. A Mobile Subscriber Experience solution can help you meet your subscribers’ needs and even predict what they want before they want it. Mobile Subscriber Experience solutions can help you solve problems related to network performance. They can also enable personalized communication with the customer and help you pinpoint exactly what each subscriber needs. Such a solution can track data in such a fine-grained manner that you will be able to invest in infrastructure that you genuinely need.

About This Book This book introduces you to the topic of mobile subscriber experience software. These technologies use a wide variety of data-gathering and analytic techniques to discover what your customers are doing and create better service for them. This technology is becoming essential for providers that want to keep subscribers happy and bring new subscribers on board.


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Icons Used in This Book As you flip through the pages of the book, you’ll see several helpful icons in the margins of the book that flag particular types of information. This icon flags information that you should try to keep in mind.

A Tip icon points out practical advice that can save you time or trouble. You don’t have to love technical details to read this book, but if you do, this icon flags information you will find especially interesting. If you’d prefer to skip over such arcane details, go right ahead.

Beyond the Book For more information on Procera’s take on mobile subscriber experience, you can take a look at www.proceranetworks.com.


Chapter 1

Mobile Subscriber Experience Basics In This Chapter ▶ Understanding why subscriber experience is important ▶ Introducing mobile subscriber experience software ▶ Understanding commercial challenges that face operators

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obile subscriber experience describes a relatively new category of software that has become essential for providers of mobile broadband services. The mobile market is in a state of massive, ongoing flux. The old ways of doing business no longer work. The best way to gain and retain subscribers now is to track their every move with sophisticated software. That’s where mobile subscriber experience comes in. It can crunch data to give you measurable, competitive advantages in real time by allowing you to know exactly what your subscribers are up to now and what they’re likely to ask for next. This chapter discusses how the subscriber experience affects subscriber retention and why that’s important. We also explain some of the basics of what mobile subscriber experience is and what it can do for you. Mobile subscriber experience software not only gives you an advantage in immediately understanding and managing the present, but also in being able to respond ahead of time to what’s likely to happen next!


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Mobile Subscriber Experience For Dummies It costs roughly seven times less to retain a subscriber than to replace one after he or she has churned. That advantage simply can’t be accrued if the service provider doesn’t completely understand what its subscribers are experiencing.

The Subscriber Experience Battleground Telco subscribers rely on their fixed and mobile broadband networks more and more. Problems using those networks (for example, in the form of dropped VoIP calls or failure to load a web page) result in dissatisfaction, increased subscriber support time, and, eventually, frustrated subscribers who just give up and move to another operator. This process of subscribers moving to another operator is called churn. Reducing churn is a major goal in telco, because retaining subscribers means more money in your pocket. (For more on this, see the section “Retaining subscribers is a cash cow.”) But an intelligent network can cater to what subscribers want and dramatically reduce churn.

Loyalty and disruption When studying the subscriber experience, you want to look at both existing and new subscribers:

✓ Loyalty of existing customers: You can study your existing customers to see what makes them stick with you. By understanding which services they use and value and gaining other insights into subscribers’ behavior, it becomes possible to design and offer increasingly attractive service packages. Plus, service experience can provide the ideas for new business model innovations. ✓ Disruption caused by customer churn: With new subscribers, service experience can allow you to respond almost immediately to their needs in a highly personalized way. It can drive nontraditional but effective new billing models. It can underpin a level of subscriber satisfaction that would be difficult if not impossible to achieve without the insights the knowledge of service experience can provide. These materials are © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distr ibution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.

Chapter 1: Mobile Subscriber Experience Basics

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We talk more about how to track subscriber experience using software in the section “Introducing Mobile Subscriber Experience Software.”

Retaining subscribers is a cash cow It’s a well-known truth in the world of marketing that the health of a subscriber-based business is better reflected by its renewal rates than by its customer acquisition rates. The media industry, too, has known this for a long time. That’s why major magazines and newspapers have long prioritized renewals over any other type of marketing. Traditionally, mobile service providers have focused mainly on acquiring new subscribers while paying less attention to existing ones. In fact, the mobile market ignored the benefits of retaining existing subscribers for way too long. But these days, customer retention is understood to be important. (For more on the history of service providers, see the sidebar “A brief history of subscriber experience.”) Keeping existing customers happy is a much more effective means of achieving revenue growth than adding expensive new customers. It simply costs a lot more to bring in a new customer than it does to retain an existing one. The trouble with acquiring new subscribers is that they come at a price, and often a significant one. You have to advertise, you have to market, you have to establish a brand presence. And generally, you have to “rob Peter to pay Paul” by offering a variety of incentives to lure new subscribers into the fold. In the mobile world, the cost of a free handset is the most obvious example. As a result, you (the service provider) might be happy to break even on a new subscriber’s initial contract, turning to profit only in future years after the acquisition cost is recouped and the subscriber has moved to the long-term renewal stream. But this profit only comes home to roost when the customer is happy with the service you’ve provided and stays on as a customer instead of ditching you for a different provider.


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A brief history of subscriber experience The global fixed-line telecommunications industry that preceded the mobile revolution of the 1980s and 1990s was based on monopolies. That generally meant one service provider per country (more or less — think BT in the U.K., Deutsche Telekom in Germany, Telecom Italia, AT&T in the U.S., and so on). There was little to no competition. If a subscriber didn’t like the service she was getting, she didn’t have anywhere else to go. Mobile services created competition in the business of telecommunica tions. But at first, acquiring new subscribers was the main preoccupation. After all, it was a new technology and the market was wide open. There were a lot of customers (subscribers) to compete for. The main focus was on building up subscriber counts, not on keeping them

happy. Losing customers didn’t even seem like a big deal since there were always more where they came from. As the 1990s became the 2000s and then the 2010s (where we are today) and the mobile market matured, the inevitable happened: market saturation. Plus, the underlying network hardware of the industry matured through different generations, even tually enabling a massive array of services that customers came to expect as a baseline of service. These realities changed the game for service providers. Constantly winning new customers was no longer a viable business strategy. In fact, it was becoming more impor tant to keep existing customers and to upsell them to ever-more-exotic new services in order to maintain and grow revenue.

And what’s the point of winning expensive new subscribers only to lose them as soon as their initial contract runs out? Even if your acquisition marketing is successful in terms of pure numbers, it will do little more than mask long-term financial loss.

Introducing Mobile Subscriber Experience Software Monitoring the subscriber experience isn’t new in itself, but today’s mobile subscriber experience software is considerably more evolved and more effective than anything that has



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preceded it. So although the term isn’t new, the functionality that it now encompasses is.

Truly understanding your subscribers The capability to clearly understand exactly what the subscriber has experienced and therefore to personalize an appropriate response is a key deliverable of the software. Mobile subscriber experience can help service providers get their priorities right. Its most obvious and immediate impact is in making existing customers happy. When your customers are happy, your renewal rates increase and bottom-line revenues shoot up. You can also offer tailored services to subscribers based on their behavioral history. Upselling existing customers in this way is a huge moneymaker. Understanding your subscribers is the key to every aspect of success; it fuels upselling, cross-selling, increasing satisfaction, and developing a proactive, need-based relationship. With an improved knowledge of the subscriber experience, the service provider can plan both network and service evolution based on real data about subscribers. By looking outward rather than inward, providers reduce the chance of unwise investments, while increasing the chance of generating a favorable customer response by creating subscriber-driven innovations.

What mobile subscriber experience software can do Any mobile subscriber experience software should be adept at handling intelligent charging, congestion management, network quality assurance, and location awareness. Those topics are covered in much more detail in Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6. Mobile subscriber experience software allows you to proactively manage your network by studying and reacting to actual data instead of hunches. It also allows you to make changes in real time instead of months after the fact.


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Mobile Subscriber Experience For Dummies Here’s a brief introduction to some of the most important things you can expect from such software:

✓ Fair use: Ensuring that a few subscribers on an access link can’t degrade the experience for all users. ✓ Analytics and forecasting: Forecasting when and why links will need to be upgraded or additional link splits will be needed to maintain acceptable quality levels. ✓ Usage management: Managing the amount and volume of bandwidth that individual subscribers, applications, and content can consume at one time. ✓ Selective optimization: Operators need to be able to trigger advanced traffic steering when congestion is due to a specific application or content type. ✓ CAPEX management: Upgrade links only when QoE can’t be maintained using congestion management techniques to reduce operational costs.

Meeting Subscriber Needs without Breaking the Bank But the big problem with trying to anticipate subscriber needs and meet them even before they arise is the problem every business faces every day: the bottom line. Providers must balance the need for pleasing subscribers with the fact that they don’t have a bottomless well of cash and in fact, need to make money. Service providers today face three overriding commercial challenges:

✓ Capital expense (CAPEX) reduction: One way for any business to improve its bottom line is to make more money. Another is to spend less. Most important of all is to spend more wisely. This is particularly true in the mobile industry — in which the globally recognized accountancy firm PWC estimates that around 20 percent of CAPEX investments are misallocated. This is mainly because investments are consistently technology-driven, rather than business-driven. Investments in technology can sometimes resemble guesswork.



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With knowledge of subscriber experience, you can base your company’s investments on hard commercial results and market demands, rather than internal politics.

✓ Increased service agility: As the battle to win and retain customers intensifies due to both competition and innovation throughout the industry, the capability to quickly identify and then launch and deliver attractive new service offerings is key to success. ✓ Operations expense optimization: Without knowledge of the subscriber experience, making operational decisions can be likened to driving to an unfamiliar destination without the aid of a road map. With that knowledge (of subscriber habits and preferences), the mobile service provider can manage expenditure to achieve maximum bang for his buck. Operations may be expensive, but that expense need not be wasteful or misplaced. Mobile subscriber experience software provides insights that can impact all three of these areas by providing knowledge that enables the service provider to quickly identify the correct responses to subscriber needs. Speed is a key facet of effective mobile subscriber experience. It not only improves the operator’s ability to do what the customer wants. It enables operators to “do it now!”


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Chapter 2

Gathering and Analyzing Data In This Chapter ▶ Getting to know Big Data ▶ Moving from historical to real-time data analysis ▶ Explaining DPI ▶ Seeing how to monetize data

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o date, mobile operators have relied mainly on historical data to support customer care and billing. But increasingly, for data to be really valuable, it has to be accrued, processed, and understood in real time. This chapter discusses Big Data, real-time analytics, and deep packet inspection. Finally, we discuss how you can use these tools to make some money.

Big Data Is Your Friend These days, Big Data is ubiquitous. Everyone is trying to track and understand the vast amount of data created and stored by today’s technology. For telco operators, Big Data is a record of everything that happens on the network, reduced to bits and bytes. It’s a lot of information (hence the “Big” in Big Data), so sorting through it can be difficult. But the information contained in Big Data, segmented into a broader context and analyzed, brings valuable insights: Tracking how customers behave (what they do) on the network is a potential gold mine. After


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What telcos did with their data in the past Although the concept of Big Data isn’t exactly new, it hasn’t historically been a preoccupation of telcos to leverage it, perhaps for the reasons mentioned in Chapter 1 (monopolistic legacy and historically limited network services). As a result, telcos have struggled to understand and get maximum value from the enormous amount of data generated by day-to-day operations. That’s not to say that telco data has been totally ignored. It hasn’t been. Many service providers have successfully implemented enterprise data warehouses and data marts, with a front-end layer of business

intelligence that supports analytic queries. But still, these are limited and it could be argued that the sum value of such approaches is significantly less than the potential held by the parts (the raw data). Historically, this approach has been acceptable and even sufficient while networks and services have slowly matured. In the past, data that provided information about operations and customers was, for instance, important in revenue assurance ini tiatives, and data generated by network probes could provide insight into network usage trends.

all, if you don’t know what customers are doing, how can you improve their experiences? Furthermore, as network evolution and, in particular, the transition to an IP backbone puts more useful data within reach, the traditional, limited analytics approaches of the recent past are becoming more and more inadequate. In a world where new services that are both more complex and more bandwidth intensive are dominant and provisioning happens more or less immediately, the capability to quickly understand and respond to market changes is critical for success.

Moving into Real Time These days, real-time data analysis is vital. Real-time analysis provides operators with the information required to make an


Chapter 2: Gathering and Analyzing Data

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immediate impact. For instance, real-time data analysis can help in the following situations:

✓ Solving or mitigating a problem: For example, identifying malicious activity or reallocating network resources on the fly during an unexpected network event. ✓ Capitalizing on an opportunity to upsell: For example, extending a promotion to a high-value customer or offloading certain subscribers during times of network congestion. Today, more and more operators are aware of the value that can be accrued by combining historic data with real-time data as part of their initiatives to better manage and mine their subscriber information. Historical data is still useful for predictive analysis — for example, identifying degrading network performance by analyzing historic data from OSS systems or recognizing a subscriber’s propensity to churn based on call center records. Historical data hasn’t ceased to be valuable in an increasingly real-time world, but nevertheless, leveraging real-time analysis is now necessary for the successful operator.

DPI: The Value of Intelligence Deep packet inspection (DPI) is a network function that classifies the data contained in packets that pass across IP networks. Packets might be examined for any number of reasons, from routing them to the correct destination to identifying viruses or security threats. DPI has also been equated traditionally with application awareness — enabling the association of data sessions with specific protocols or applications running over a network. The granular visibility into network behavior this reveals can play a key role in Big Data initiatives. Done in real time, DPI is the basis for immediate action. Because both problems and opportunities related to network performance can be immediately identified, DPI is a basis for improving the subscriber experience. An operator can gain


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Mobile Subscriber Experience For Dummies real insight into customer behavior by augmenting subscriber information with the detail that DPI can provide. Deep packet inspection works best in tandem with other components of mobile subscriber experience. Its value is enhanced when information from other sources (for instance, billing) is added to augment it. Each bit of context that can be applied to data enables new insights and opportunities for enhancing the subscriber experience. Examples of this include:

✓ Subscriber identification: The definition of a subscriber is changing. Many operators no longer refer to average revenue per user (ARPU), because the data plan focusing on a single-device user is rapidly being replaced by shared data plans with multiple users and multiple devices. Today, the term average revenue per account (ARPA) is replacing ARPU. When working with ARPU, being able to identify a specific subscriber’s traffic and also differentiate between the devices and users within that account is vital. Services targeted at a specific device in the plan, such as parental control, require fine-grained subscriber identification and not just generic identification.

✓ Application classification: Though application identification has always been DPI’s core domain, classification of applications is no longer a cut-and-dried function. For example, a DPI system might be able to identify certain network activity as Facebook or Twitter traffic, but overlook the embedded video content. All application classification isn’t created equal; the more fine-grained the identification capabilities, the more value that can be delivered to the analytics engine. ✓ Content visibility: Content is becoming a cornerstone of the perceived user experience, with users becoming quickly frustrated by a slow download or a patchy streaming experience. Visibility into the type of content being accessed, and even visibility into which content delivery node the content is being delivered from, can improve the customer experience by allowing the operator to address specific issues associated with that content.


Chapter 2: Gathering and Analyzing Data

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For example, YouTube is far more resilient to network stalls than Netflix on certain devices with small buffers. CDN awareness is also important for operators looking to optimize their spending on peering. It makes sense to invest in CDNs that are delivering content that your consumers rate highly as critical to their user experience.

✓ Service plan usage trends: Understanding how a subscriber uses different service plans allows an operator to deliver a higher quality broadband service. For example, if subscribers to a specific plan are more likely to stream video or use social networking, an operator can plan its infrastructure investments to ensure that when that plan’s uptake rate increases, the network can be upgraded to support the usage. It also enables the operator to evolve the plans based on that insight into usage. ✓ Device visibility: All devices aren’t created equal, at least from a broadband consumption perspective. iPhone users behave differently from Android users, and tablet and dongle users consume far more bandwidth than pure smartphones. With the constant stream of new devices being added to fixed and mobile broadband networks, understanding what devices are active on the network is an important experience factor, enabling better traffic management practices and even different service plan options. ✓ Quality of experience (QoE): The user’s QoE — or even perceived QoE — will often determine a subscriber’s propensity to churn. By pinpointing quality issues for specific applications or content, the operator can address those issues before they become a problem — and before the customer makes a call into technical support. Solving problems before the user notices them leads to a lower churn rate. The combination of these attributes with relevant subscriber data such as service plan, billing history, and relative profitability can provide operators with real insights into customer behavior. For example, Gold Service iPhone users in Manhattan like to stream financial quotes from Bloomberg and prepaid customers using Android handsets like to tweet from local sporting events. By adding context to subscriber data contained in systems, such as subscriber provisioning, billing, and customer care, DPI adds value to that data and makes it more actionable.


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Monetizing Your Data Once you figure out how to use the data you already have sitting around, you can act on your insights. By feeding that combination of network attributes and subscriber data into a policy engine, you can make relevant and targeted decisions to increase revenue. A few examples:

✓ Customer profitability analysis: By combining revenue per user with call center data (for instance, how often a customer calls in with an issue) and details about the data the subscriber is consuming (peak versus nonpeak hours, how bandwidth-intensive his applications are, and so on), the operator can gain a complete view of the relative value of the subscriber and use that information in its customer retention initiatives. ✓ Targeted marketing: If an operator can identify that a specific subscriber is a frequent online gamer, it could offer that customer a gaming package that bundles connectivity with certain multiplayer games. Alternately, identifying that another subscriber is a heavy user of content from kid-focused sites could prompt an offer for a parental control service. ✓ Revenue management: Combining awareness of how subscribers or devices should be using the network with granular data on how they actually are using it can reveal revenue leakage and fraud. This feature is particularly valuable in the case of machine-to-machine services, where an embedded device generating unusual traffic could indicate fraud. ✓ Subscriber data brokering: Aggregate data or analytics based on network intelligence, such as what sort of content a specific type of user is likely to be consuming during certain times of day, can be brokered to third parties such as mobile advertisers and marketing firms. Ultimately, once the hype surrounding data is cleared away, it boils down to the operator’s ability to better understand its subscribers, which allows it to make decisions that maximize profitability. To achieve that goal, the operator must fully leverage the information sources at its fingertips, including the network and the intelligence that can be mined from it via DPI.


Chapter 3

Intelligent Charging In This Chapter ▶ Understanding intelligent charging ▶ Looking for a great solution

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oday’s mobile subscriber is incredibly dependent on his or her data network. Whether for good old communications purposes, for social networking, for information, entertainment, to purchase something, or for another reason, everybody seems to want to be constantly connected. And this is in spite of the fact that right now, the mobile experience is less than optimal for most users. But the appetite for interacting with mobiles so heavily makes network planning (and thus improving subscriber experience) more difficult. The models used by network operators to forecast network capacity become obsolete on a daily basis, which negatively impacts network quality and makes the subscriber’s experience worse. In turn, this leads to increased churn. Smart operators are now using Big Data to delve into customer behavior, habits, and preferences (for more info on Big Data, see Chapter 2). They can put what is learned into action in the form of a charging mechanism, called intelligent charging, that’s responsive to real customer needs. Because they’re able to closely monitor each customer, mobile service providers need no longer assume all customers are alike. Intelligent charging is one of the most important areas that can help improve subscriber experience.


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Intelligent Charging 101 Intelligent mobile service charging is on the rise for a lot of reasons — not least because the mobile world is changing every day. All bytes don’t have the same value to subscribers, especially with rich media content streaming becoming the norm. Personalized services represent a way for mobile operators to tie usage to applications and offer consumers value-based, predictable pricing. Three recent changes in the way mobile works have helped create an environment where intelligent charging makes sense and is acceptable to subscribers:

✓ Using mobile applications is becoming routine for consumers. Not only are mobile applications a part of everyday life, but they change every day. And mobile applications will continue to innovate. Expect new device form factors, hardware capabilities, and advanced functionality on an ongoing basis. Applications are already increasingly location-aware. Many existing mobile applications, such as social networking and e-commerce, will be enhanced with new technology. Mobile payments, allowing subscribers to pay for purchases with their phones, will become even more common. While viewing OTT video is gaining momentum on fixed-line networks, video streaming is already shifting to mobile devices. Mobile applications will continue to take on new roles at a very fast pace. ✓ Mobile operators are moving away from unlimited data plans. When smartphones initially came to market, they were often tied to unlimited data plans to entice new subscribers. As smartphone penetration exceeded 50 percent, limited data service plans became the norm in some countries. Mobile operators are abandoning unlimited data plans because every megabyte transferred increases what they have to spend on infrastructure. Unlimited data plans mean that operators are spending more without making more money. ✓ Subscribers want personalized services to match their usage needs. With unlimited data plans going away, mobile subscribers must manage their mobile usage within the confines of quota limits. This puts the burden


Chapter 3: Intelligent Charging

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of quota management on the subscribers, which makes them more aware of how much data they’re using. For instance, some subscribers have to deal with costly overage charges. Other subscribers aren’t reaching their quota limits, which means they’re paying too much for their data service plans.

What to Look for in an Intelligent Charging Solution So to create intelligent charging mobile network, operators can respond by creating service plans that are consistent with a subscriber’s application usage profile. Because subscribers are different, a variety of subscriber policies are created. Implementing a more granular solution and enforcement mechanism that can determine in real time the applications in use, the location of the subscriber, the day and time, and the device is the requirement for improving the experience. All this information can then be used to create personalized services to optimize the subscriber’s experience, shifting current mobile network data services from inefficient, subscriber-blind services to intelligent, subscriber-aware app clouds. When you’re shopping for a mobile subscriber experience software suite that addresses intelligent charging, be sure to look for the following qualities.

Service charging implementation Mobile operators have already invested heavily in the policy, charging, and billing systems needed to implement personalized mobile services. To implement intelligent charging, operators need to coordinate closely between the management and the enforcement systems. They also need to keep a close eye on usage trends that indicate potentially valuable new service offering opportunities.


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Mobile Subscriber Experience For Dummies This is accomplished by fast and efficient integration across these network elements, leveraging standards-based interfaces. This is because such platforms need to interact with various CDMA, 3G UMTS, and 4G LTE mobile network elements to provide policy enforcement that is the heart of intelligent mobile service charging. Together, they help mobile operators address prerequisites for success. A pan-infrastructure view — drawn from across the traditional OSS and BSS divide — is a critical aspect of progressive deployments. Any solution needs to integrate with a variety of legacy OSS and BSS systems across the mobile operator’s business. This will require knowledge of multiple protocols (Radius, Diameter, SOAP, JSON, and so on) for retrieving the requisite information. Particularly important is the integration with policy, because the intelligent charging plans need to be enforced in real time.

Service velocity A key aspect of implementing personalized services is recognizing changing usage behaviors and reacting quickly. Providers need to dynamically create services. The first step in creating new services is to understand where and when mobile subscribers use specific applications on their mobile devices. This informs marketing teams about mobile usage characteristics to help determine exactly what personalized services to create. This means having the capability to radically simplify the creation of new services which, at present, often take months using legacy software. You also need to implement flexible charging models that support creation of personalized services — with service velocity — enabling mobile operators to respond to usage patterns as they happen and seize these revenue opportunities. Operators that don’t deliver service velocity will fall behind and miss new revenue opportunities that result from impulse buys sparked by new applications.


Chapter 3: Intelligent Charging

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Tiered charging An intelligent charging solution can implement highly personalized service plans that, for instance, might tie specific devices to specific applications, set different, category-based volume usage limits, and more. Tiered charging allows greater flexibility when creating value-based personalized services. Tiered service models can include charging for services based on application-based volumes, application categories, application prioritization, subscriber location, day and time, or specific applications and websites. Given the usage scenario, these policies can be used to implement intelligent, deliberate charging, with varying rates that reinforce personalized, value-based service pricing.

Zero-rating Zero-rating is another charging mechanism where application usage or specific website access is allowed for “free” as part of a base-level data service plan. This can be used to create new services tied to specific devices: creating subscriberspecific app cloud plans. Time usage constraints can be added, allowing free usage at specific times or days. Not only can this be used to create subscriber-specific service plans, but also to drive promotions tied to new devices or services and attract new customers.


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Chapter 4

Congestion Management In This Chapter ▶ Understanding congestion management ▶ Looking for a good solution

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hen the network gets overloaded, it slows down. Services don’t load as quickly as subscribers require. As a result, they may jump ship and move to another operator. The term congestion management means exactly what it sounds like it means. Any network — transport, communication, computer — that carries traffic is open to the threat of overuse. When telecommunications networks struggle to keep up, poor subscriber experiences ensue. Providers need a tool to manage congestion in a way that meets the changing requirements of the network and of subscribers but without requiring unlimited bandwidth. Congestion management applications offer features and functions that allow operators to manage congestion in a way that ensures maximal experience for the end customer. By using such applications, operators can reduce churn and increase customer satisfaction, thereby increasing their own operational effectiveness. Congestion management is a subset of something called network quality assurance (we discuss network quality assurance Chapter 5). For now, you could say that managing congestion is network quality assurance’s most important, but not only, task. We discuss that task in this chapter.


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Mobile Subscriber Experience For Dummies _________________

Congestion Management 101 In order to gain traction with subscribers, mobile networks try to act like broadband networks. And as a way of growing market share, this strategy has been successful; mobile communications service providers are doing really well at increasing subscriber counts. Unfortunately, this success comes at a price; they have to deal with the reality of inherent congestion in a network that’s trying to act like a broadband network but isn’t designed for the purpose. Managing congestion proactively to create the very best experience for subscribers is critical.

Understanding congestion domains Any single segment of a network that can suffer from congestion is called a congestion domain. The different domain segments that can suffer congestion in a mobile network include RF (radio), backhaul (the segment between the base station and the core or distribution part of the network), the core network segments, or the Internet connections (transit/peering links). Each of these congestion domains can be independently congested at any point in time, and so you need to queue each packet multiple times. Key to all of this is knowing not only the capacity of each link, but also what traffic passes over it. The latter is tricky in mobile networks because you need to know, in real time, where each subscriber is located. This includes information about his current CellID (which can change frequently), RNC (if applicable), and SGSN/GGSN (SGW/PGW). In general, the congestion domains can be treated in a similar manner, but the RF segment has many technical differences that need to be handled in a very specific fashion. When looking for a congestion management solution, look for one that emphasizes the importance of managing congestion domains with a special way of managing the RF segment.


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RAN awareness RAN awareness means knowing the location (by cell) of each subscriber in real time. It’s key to almost all traffic management and analytics use cases in mobile networks. In the following sections, we outline two ways to be RAN aware, both of which have limitations. The details are pretty technical, but if you’re going to address the issue of congestion you need to know not only what’s happening in your network at any given time, but where! To achieve this, you can leverage your existing operational support systems (OSS) infrastructure.

RAN awareness using OSS integrations Using OSS integrations could be as simple as enabling location updates from the RAN to the packet core and then forwarding RADIUS packets from the GGSN/P-GW to a congestion management solution. Typically, that’s a lot harder than it sounds, because location update will drive a substantial signaling load on the network. The control plane elements might already be heavily loaded and this additional information could be “too much to handle.” But without it, the RADIUS integration will simply have information about the location of the subscriber when the data connection (PDP context) is activated and deactivated. Sometimes you can get five-minute updates on top of that. The “accuracy” of such solutions is known to be roughly 90 percent, which is good enough for some of the use cases, but definitely not all.

RAN awareness using network probes Deploying probes on the IUps (between the RNC and SGSN/ GGSN) interface in 3G networks is one way of getting enough signaling information to do RAN awareness. But you still need the RNC to forward location updates from the RAN when a subscriber switches cell. Probing the IUb interface (between the base station and the RNC) would work, but would cost a fortune. Technically there should be no reason such an integration could not be done in real time, but even probing the IUps interface is a very costly exercise for most operators.


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What to Look for in a Congestion Management Solution Once you understand what congestion management can do for your business, knowing how to most effectively treat the traffic and what analytics to run is a big exercise in itself. This is where business interests come in: building a brand, figuring out what is important for a particular operator. Does your company seek to deliver cheap services, high availability, the best bandwidth, the most flexibility, or some other superlative? The possibilities are endless so how can you achieve your goals? Congestion management comes in many flavors. However, some of the basic physical elements will be the same throughout. Take a look at Figure 4-1 to see the basics of how a congestion management solution prioritizes traffic. You need to make sure the solution has the following elements:

✓ An enforcement point for all actions and analytics collection is required. Although functionality isn’t dependent on network placement, these enforcers (which need to work in real time) are typically deployed in close proximity to border routers or network aggregation points where congestion may occur or be managed. ✓ A subscriber manager is needed to manage congestion across network topology and deliver subscriber awareness. This will need to be linked to the enforcer. ✓ Ability to collect analytics data for determining the best congestion policies and identifying hotspots in the network. ✓ To be maximally useful, the solution will ideally be easy to configure and use easy-to-use visualization both historically and in real time. For instance, a point-and-click approach to policy creation would allow the operator to quickly create, test, and deploy services in a matter of minutes.


________________________ Chapter 4: Congestion Management

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Figure 4-1: Congestion management .

Plus, make sure any congestion management solution you look for has the following capabilities.

Managing queues The capability to manage queues is a logical requirement in any scenario where congestion is an issue. To improve the subscriber experience, the operator needs an active queue management system that likely deploys traffic management algorithms that are highly effective at managing applications TCP sessions. This will enable operators to achieve highly scalable fair usage for thousands of users on a single link. In other words, a high volume of traffic won’t degrade the user experience. In short, the solution needs to remove bottlenecks as a source of congestion. (We discuss active queue management in considerably more detail in Chapter 5.)

Hierarchical management Another key capability is knowing what’s going on, and this can be achieved through hierarchical management. Effective hierarchical management means that from any single location in the network, the operator can immediately have accesslevel visibility to all the links that the subscriber’s traffic passes over.


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Parallel queuing The operator needs parallel queuing of traffic, which means traffic is queued into multiple, simultaneous queues and actions based on prioritized policies. What this means is the operator has the capability to not only see and have input into network congestion, but also to implement specific and predefined steps to address it. Most importantly, traffic can match multiple rules and the most restrictive policy is implemented to ensure a good user experience. This means that the operator needs excellent analytics and forecasting tools necessary to ensure it has visibility into both subscriber and network behavior. Armed with this information, the operator can make the right network investments, deliver the right service packages, and most effectively leverage its own network’s capacity to maximum effect.

Performance And, of course, any solution must actually stand up to the rigors of a massive communications network. The scalability, reliability, and capacity demands are considerable. Make sure your solution has already been implemented and that it works well with mobile.


Chapter 5

Network Quality Assurance In This Chapter ▶ Understanding network quality assurance ▶ Looking for a great solution

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ne element that is sometimes overlooked when attempting to optimize mobile subscriber experience is optimizing the network itself. By understanding, closely monitoring, and fine-tuning the network, operators can better serve customers and better manage their own operations. They can also see clearly where investment in the network is needed, and where it would not make such an impact. Because network costs are astronomical, optimizing the network should be a part of any mobile subscriber experience software set you consider. Network quality assurance includes, but goes beyond, dealing with the issue of congestion management (described in Chapter 4). Although congestion management is a key element of network quality assurance, there’s more to it than just that. We look at some of the other areas that need attention in this chapter.

Network Quality Assurance 101 Two major areas in the field of network quality assurance are active queue management and fairness.


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Active queue management Active queue management (AQM) gives your network a hand by helping packet transfer happen more efficiently. TCP is the main protocol used for transferring packets, and it does a reasonably good job of adapting to the circumstances of the network. But a reasonably good job isn’t good enough for mobile networks. AQM can give TCP engines a hand in understanding available network resources. As a result, your networks can adapt more quickly to changing usage. The benefits include:

✓ More goodput (for example, better utilization of actual payload on the network) ✓ Lower overall latency (less queue usage in the network elements) ✓ Better fairness among subscribers (covered in the next section) AQM is an algorithm that deals with how packets are queued and which packets are dropped (when drops are necessary). AQM deploys software that tracks flow and subscribers. And AQM has a lot of CPU resources available to help it make smart decisions. The point is simply that with AQM you can run your links hotter, with lower latency, and better utilization — and still have happier subscribers. There is no downside.

Fairness: Democracy in the network Fairness is probably most powerful of all the aspects of network assurance management when it comes to increasing quality of experience (QoE). When it comes to networks, the concept of fairness means that one subscriber can’t affect the QoE of another subscriber. But these days, downloading large amounts of data is common. And without fairness, it takes only a few heavy downloading subscribers on a cell before latency for everyone shoots through the roof and QoE goes out the window. These materials are © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distr ibution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.

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Without fairness, even if you have ten subscribers doing the exact same thing, for example, watching Netflix, the QoE might work well for two of your viewers (most likely the two closest to the base station and at a very high bitrate) and stutter and stall for the other eight. Without fairness, the subscriber with the most number of flows will get the most bandwidth, so if on this same cell a subscriber is downloading on Steam or using P2P, he could easily destroy the experience to the point that none of your ten subscribers will get a decent QoE. The way to fix this issue is to share the bandwidth fairly among the subscribers. You give each of the ten subscribers the same bandwidth allocation and the video experience will be solid for all of them. See Figure 5-1.

Figure 5-1: What fairness looks like.

Fairness can be addressed by software in a couple different ways.

✓ There’s host fairness, which is simply a stochastic fair queuing mechanism where each subscriber is hashed into a bucket (possibly shared with other subscribers) and gets a subset of the queue space (in other words, each subscriber is allowed to queue a finite set of packets). This achieves some level of isolation, but aggressive applications will still be able to get a larger piece than they deserve.


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Fairness misconceptions There’s a preconception that the RF scheduler in the RAN today is fair. That is total nonsense. The RF scheduler is implemented to give the most resources to whoever is downloading the most. This feature made sense when web browsing was the most common application, because focusing on subscribers with large downloads meant that such users could be handled more quickly and

then the RF scheduler could forget about them for a while and focus on the others. By the way, 4th generation, LTE networks don’t change this. They merely increase the available bandwidth, but since applications today are hungrier than ever, that’s hardly even a stop gap. LTE networks are just as sensitive.

✓ The alternative is FairSplit, where each active subscriber is allocated a piece of the available bandwidth. If a subscriber is idle, his allocation is forfeited and if a subscriber doesn’t use his whole allocation, then that bandwidth will be shared among the other subscribers.

What to Look for in a Network Quality Assurance Solution Network quality assurance differs from congestion management approaches highlighted in the preceding chapter. If you like, NQA is a different solution set sitting in a different place in the CSP’s infrastructure. Network quality assurance requires an enforcer function to act as the enforcement point for all actions and analytics collection. Although functionality isn’t dependent on network placement, real-time enforcers are typically deployed in close proximity to border routers or network aggregation points where congestion may occur or be managed. A subscriber manager is needed to provision network topology and subscriber awareness that the real-time enforcer uses to manage network congestion.


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An intelligence center is required to collect analytics data for determining the best network management policies and identifying hotspots in the network. And the operator will require a solution that is easily configured through a user-friendly client. A point-and-click approach allows the operator to quickly create, test, and deploy services in a matter of minutes. Network quality assurance solutions that address the following issues can improve the mobile subscriber experience.

Managing queues Any solution must have the capability to manage queues. With support in this area, the operator can deliver more goodput (better utilization of actual payload on the network) and lower overall latency (less queue usage in the network elements) in its network. Optimizing the customer experience requires a multilayered approach to be fully effective. For instance, managing congestion while failing to address fairness issues won’t solve the problem of keeping customers happy. You need to take a holistic view of everything that impacts what your customers experience on the network. Not all traffic management algorithms are created equal. The capability to manage network TCP applications effectively is critical and the operator should prioritize functionality in this area.

Fair usage The capability to ensure fair usage for thousands of subscribers on a single link in a highly scalable way is mandatory. The solution must have the capability to allocate bandwidth on any link based on the number of active subscribers or connections to ensure fair access bandwidth for all subscribers, resulting in a better quality of experience for all users.


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Analytics and forecasting Effective hierarchical management from a single network location to deliver access-level visibility into performance to support hundreds of categories and millions of entries without any performance degradation is today a prerequisite. In other words, advanced analytics and forecasting tools are required. An intelligence center is also required to enable visibility into subscriber and network behavior, enabling operators to make the right network investments and to deliver service packages that leverage their network’s capacity.

Usage management The capability to classify traffic into separate but simultaneous queues based on policy is also mandatory. And of course, as before, the solution needs to perform at high levels, particularly from the perspectives of reliability, capacity, and scale. The visibility of subscriber, application, content, device, location, and QoE enables flexible management of the subscriber’s user experience to maximize customer satisfaction.


Chapter 6

Location, Location, Location In This Chapter ▶ Understanding location awareness ▶ Finding what you need

I

f you’ve read the rest of this book, you may have noticed that the word “location” keeps creeping in. Are those who operate mobile networks like realtors, where everything is a question of “location, location, location”? Well, up to point, yes. In this chapter, we dip our feet into the important topic of real-time, location-based services and subscriber intelligence. Location information enables operators to react proactively to performance issues, rather than after-the-fact, as has been the case in the past. This means addressing issues before they become embedded problems! Plus, knowledge of location can significantly enrich other information about subscribers and network performance, thus making it even more valuable. Location also adds a new perspective to the congestion management paradigm, making it easier to address effectively. A DPI-based location solution is likely to quickly become a necessity for the competitive operator in a 4G world.

Location Awareness 101 In the mobile network, a subscriber’s location is the single most important factor that can impact quality of experience (QoE). As consumers carry more devices, mobile tethering and These materials are © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distr ibution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.

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Mobile Subscriber Experience For Dummies _________________ hotspots proliferate, and the Internet of Things (IoT) begins to take hold, the last mile (which is the physical point where the service is actually delivered to the subscriber) on mobile networks is more prone to congestion and other quality issues. The key for mobile operators to ensuring a high QoE for their subscribers is to have real-time location awareness that can be placed in context with the subscriber radio access network (RAN) and IP QoE metrics as seen by the subscriber. Yet most mobile operators are able to measure only basic key performance indicators (KPIs) in the mobile network based on the signaling between the devices and the handset: basic connectivity (for example, the dropped call) and activity heartbeats (data going to the handset). Video stalls, slow page load times, social networking feeds not loading, or slow sync times for cloud services — the KPIs that really matter to subscribers — are completely beyond the capability of most operators to diagnose or resolve. To achieve visibility of these performance indicators and to consistently deliver a higher QoE, operators need subscriber experience analytics solutions in their network with real-time location awareness.

Getting a perspective on RAN The operator today needs a solution that delivers a combination of RAN and DPI intelligence and services. Such a solution represents a great leap forward toward enabling a service that gives network operators real-time signaling updates from any SIM-enabled mobile device.

example, 2G, 3G, or LTE). The 3GPP signaling information (signal strength, error codes, available networks, and so on) could be configurable and the software can be loaded over-the-air (OTA) using already deployed systems.

In such scenarios, real-time inforRather than deploy costly probes mation is streamed into the solu throughout the network, an IT-based tion, where the location and quality solution approach can access infor- information can be used to ensure mation directly from devices — the subscriber experience, quickly regardless of device type, operating diagnose problems, and deliver system, or RAN access type (for advanced services to the subscriber.


______________________ Chapter 6: Location, Location, Location

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What to Look for in a Location Awareness Solution Leveraging a new, software-based approach to location management can deliver huge cost-savings versus networkcentric approaches to tackling location issues. Location information can help ensure different services with different resource requirements can be more effectively managed in different ways. When you’re shopping for a mobile subscriber experience software suite that addresses location, be sure to look for the following qualities.

Location analytics With the combination of RAN and DPI intelligence, mobile operators can analyze a full set of customer experience metrics to guide operational and capital expenditures as well as identify new service opportunities. Different heat maps (images that visually illustrate physical network performance) can be generated that show the QoE in each cell tower, for each service group, for each device type, for each application, and many other views based on a prospectively broad range of intelligence metrics. These heat maps can quickly identify for the operators where they may have deficiencies in their network and where new opportunities exist. See Figure 6-1. Location analytics can also compare the number of subscribers receiving a good experience to those receiving a poor experience. This enables root-cause analysis of customer issues, which may be very simple. For instance, a specific device type may be having an issue with your services. Or a specific cell site with a high concentration of high-ARPU (average return per user) subscribers could be experiencing congestion. Knowing these types of things can make for simple fixes in certain circumstances.


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Figure 6-1: Image of a heat map.

Congestion management Effective congestion management requires both topology awareness and location awareness. Many operators use very coarse-grained congestion management, with no application awareness or use basic fairness algorithms. Such heavyhanded solutions can actually make the service experience worse for all subscribers. Yet operators need to ensure that the mobile network takes into account subscribers, service plans, and applications as factors when managing congestion. Video traffic, for example, needs different congestion management techniques than web browsing. The operator may also want to manage high-ARPU subscribers differently than prepaid subscribers, because they generate significant revenue and will cost more to replace if they churn. Combining real-time location awareness with sophisticated queue management enables the mobile operator to maximize the efficiency of its existing infrastructure.

Location-based service plans Location awareness can be a powerful option for creating new service plans. Mobile operators can use their LTE networks to


______________________ Chapter 6: Location, Location, Location

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offer a home residential mobile broadband service to monetize residential cell towers that aren’t heavily used. The subscribers get a higher data volume and a lower cost when they are in their home cell tower (either by using tethering or a mobile hotspot device), and they get access to potentially more bandwidth than a DSL offering. Location awareness also offers Internet of Things providers fine-grained control over where SIM-enabled devices can transmit data (and what they can transmit). For example, an ATM machine doesn’t need the capability to drive down the street streaming Netflix, so the operator might choose to limit that system to a specific cell tower and only a specific type of traffic.

Customer care visibility Insights gained from understanding RAN quality and location are extremely valuable tools for customer care agents attempting to solve a customer’s problems during a service call. With the right solution, customer care teams can see a comprehensive view of a user’s mobile data experience, including plan usage, upsell opportunities, application usage and quality, and RAN quality. Access to real-time information during the customer service process dramatically increases the speed with which problems can be addressed. In the long run, this saves money. This detailed information about each customer can be presented to operators during calls — in historical or real-time view. This comprehensive view improves customer care’s ability to solve customer issues on the first call. Solving problems the first time means there are no costly escalations that also negatively affect the subscriber’s perception of the mobile service.

Crowd-sourced drive testing Some operators’ primary competitive differentiation is their network coverage. And mobile operators spend a great deal of time and money to ensure good network coverage for their


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Mobile Subscriber Experience For Dummies _________________ subscribers. However, often they’re very reactive to customer complaints on poor coverage — only responding to issues after the fact. This slow response is a common reason for churn, especially with high-ARPU subscribers. Using location awareness solutions, the operator can install an applet on customer devices and proactively monitor when a subscriber loses coverage. The operator can then notify the customer that it’s aware of — and working to correct — the coverage deficiency. This method is a huge cost savings over the existing method of drive testing (which delivers an operator-centric view), while providing the operator with information from the customer’s perspective, which is what really matters. This approach can help operators save money while also helping them to make themselves look better. It’s a way to provide better customer service that actually saves money.


Chapter 7

Ten Wins for Subscriber Experience In This Chapter ▶ Ten mobile

subscriber experience benefits

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nderstanding the mobile subscriber experience is critical to success in the next-generation communications world. This book is here to help, but it’s hard to cover everything you need to know about the mobile subscriber experience in just 48 pages. So this chapter discusses ten key wins you’ll get by deploying next-generation mobile subscriber experience solutions to deliver better quality to your customers.

Happy Customers! If you don’t have customers, you won’t get paid. Acquiring new customers is more expensive than spending to keep existing customers happy. Using the mobile subscriber experience to deliver great service will make your customer an advocate for your service. For more on this, see Chapter 1.

Save Your Bacon Gaining visibility into what your network issues are ensures that you spend money on the right things. Just because your network is congested doesn’t always mean you need to invest — only invest when you can improve the quality of the network.


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Know Your Subscribers Knowing your subscribers through analytics ensures that you can offer a network service offering that meets your customer’s needs, expectations, and actual usage. For more on this, see Chapter 2.

Save Your Customers Money If you’re offering service packages that better reflect a customer’s usage, that customer can save money by purchasing the right service package. For more on this, see Chapter 3.

Deliver a World-Class Network With the right mobile subscriber experience solution, your network will be world class and a competitive differentiator.

Differentiate Your Service Offerings By leveraging your visibility into subscriber metrics like applications, content, or location, you can offer services that competitors can’t match — winning you new customers and keeping existing ones.

Become Proactive, Not Just Reactive With RAN visibility through device applet deployment, you can know when your subscribers have a bad coverage experience and proactively notify them that you’re addressing the issue and even offer them a monetary benefit. For more on this, see Chapter 6.


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Diagnose and Solve Customer Issues Quickly When a customer calls in with a problem, you have all you need to diagnose and resolve the issue for him or her on the first call, saving you money and the subscriber time. For more on this, see Chapter 6.

High-Value Customers Get High-Quality Service Not all customers are equal — if you pay $100 a month for a service, the mobile operator wants to keep you happy. Awareness of service plans during congestion management ensures high-value customers don’t churn. For more on this, see Chapter 6.

Great Data, Not Just Big Data More data isn’t always better. Make sure that you can harvest the best data from your subscriber experience solutions. For more on this topic, see Chapter 2.


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Procera Mobile Subscriber Experience for Dummies

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