The current boom in Internet traffic pushes the Communication Service Providers (CSP) to tackle the following:
-    Broadband monetization to respond to current revenue disintermediation for the data traffic. As today’s Internet is mostly benefiting to Over-The-Top players  (Google, eBay, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon…),  CSPs have to create new revenue streams through personalized services with differentiated QoS and services access control.
-    Congestion Mitigation to prevent Quality of Experience degradation. To support endless appetite for Internet bandwidth, CSPs have to invest continuously in new broadband access technology (mainly LTE or Fiber). In a highly competitive environment with stagnating ARPU due to voice revenues drop, CSPs need to control more tightly additional capacity purchase by still keeping the quality of experience as a top priority.

Broadband monetization and Congestion Mitigation require CSPs operating xDSL, Cable, FTTx, 2/3G, LTE, Wimax or Wifi to be in control of their IP data traffic. This is the objective of policy control, but new policy settings are not enough, unless these policies are enforced appropriately in the network to enable the expected “smart pipe”. Current solutions clearly present a wide variety of criteria to create rich policies based on complex scenario and use cases but they often deliver a limited value to CSPs as enforcement solutions are too much constrained by features, performances and/or cost.

Take a simple example with current meaning of user fairness:

User fairness is usually defined as a volume allowance per month, sometimes per day. However this does not reflect the real usage fairness as traffic has a completely different impact at 3 am at night than at 8 pm at peak time. Only real time bandwidth consumption does really reflect the impact on the network ressources.

And this is why with Vedicis platform, each user bandwidth is managed individually with threshold to define a reserved (minimum) bandwidth or maximum bandwidth levels: i.e. all packets for a given user above 1 Mbps may be dropped at peak time, while packets below reserved bandwidth threshold are prioritized.  These thresholds are totally configurable as a policy, and may be affected to users depending on the ARPU or the churn risk, and triggered only at peak time as congestion is dynamically detected, or depending on other network sizing criteria like CellID traffic load. VIP subscribers will receive a better bandwidth allocation at peak time and enjoy a better Quality of Experience.

User fairness is a good solution to mitigate abusive usage for network operators on the condition it means "user bandwidth fairness"...