Integration between policy management and charging systems is both a vital requirement and a potential obstacle to new personalized service plans. The majority of tier one mobile operators plan to integrate policy servers with separate charging systems rather than deploy pre-integrated policy and charging systems from a single vendor.

Join Tekelec for a webinar on Tuesday, February 7, at 11:00 EST to learn more about the options for policy and charging integration, and why independent solutions are service providers’ preference. Heavy Reading’s Graham Finnie and Tekelec’s Joanne Steinberg will examine the survey results and discuss the importance working with a policy vendor that has integrated its policy server with charging systems across multiple tier one operators

Sign up here.

Tekelec published research from industry analyst firm Heavy Reading showing that the majority of tier one mobile operators plan to integrate policy servers with existing charging and billing systems rather than deploy pre-integrated policy and charging systems from a single vendor. The full release is here.

Some key findings include:
- Nearly 70 percent of tier ones said they will use the policy server (a policy and charging rules function, or PCRF) to perform some charging or rating functions.

- Tier one operators have run into significant challenges implementing online charging for data. For example, almost 60 percent cited higher costs due to customization and professional services.

What do you think of these findings?

CTO Doug Suriano discusses how mobile data will spur innovations in 2012 – especially in terms of pricing models – in an article for RCR Wireless. He predicts that this year will see advancements in personalized plans and cloud services, as well as a major rise in signaling traffic.

According to Suriano:

As mobile data matures in developed markets, we expect several significant evolutions in 2012. The biggest for subscribers will be pricing plan innovations, providing new personalized service and cost options. In addition, we forecast rapid cloud service adoption, new content business models and new device segmentation.

The full article can be found here.

Tekelec was recently named the top policy management vendor by Infonetics Research’s annual global service provider survey for the third consecutive year.  Tekelec leads the list of companies named as a top policy vendor with 50 percent more respondents than the second-place company.

As many operators already know, policy management is fast becoming mission critical as service providers try to cope with the broadband data boom.  Most early policy deployments have focused on one or two use cases such congestion control or fair-use management, but that’s all about to change. As traffic levels swell and competition heats up, operators are looking at a broader and more complex set of use cases. Creating a more sophisticated  policy environment means more triggers and more frequent policy adaptations. So, it’s not surprising that operators looking for easy-to-use policy creation environment that makes it as simple as possible to create and deploy policies themselves.

Tekelec’s policy server/PCRF is designed to help providers shape policies quickly to respond to changing network conditions and subscriber behavior.  With the system’s simple GUI, service-provider personnel, even non-specialists, can intuitively build complex policy rules. The GUI is based on a “wizard” interface, which contains a large number of triggers, conditions and actions. Using interactive pull-down menus, users can populate the network with any number of “if/then” cases. If needed, rules can be modified later, according to variables defined by the service provider, ­without the user having to know a specific language syntax. And, because Tekelec’s policy management system has been successfully integrated with an extensive list of other policy enforcement endpoints, operators can easily integrate the PCRF with their existing policy and charging infrastructure.

For more information, click here to download a free white paper that outlines key considerations in selecting a next-generation policy server.