Heavy Reading White Paper – by Graham Finnie
In the past two years, policy management caught fire as network operators sought better ways to manage the way bandwidth is allocated and congestion is handled. Now, many are looking to move on from these early deployments, and seeking to put policy at the heart of their traffic management and service development strategies.
But as policy deployments scale up, it raises major new issues for operators. Can policy servers cope as new use cases are added? What will it cost? And can the new business case really stack up?
The purpose of this paper is to examine these issues. In it, we explain why policy servers must scale up massively as mobile operators move into the LTE era. We look in detail at a key measure of power – transactions per second (TPS) – and model the impact of new policy use cases on TPS requirements. And we analyze how this affects the cost of policy deployments, using real cost data. We conclude that, so long as operators choose a next-generation policy solution capable of scaling to meet demand, at a predictable and manageable cost, the business case looks viable in principle.