Like a long-lost friend, unlimited data is getting a warm reception from media – major networks and trade channels – but will it make a real comeback among subscribers? And if so, will it attract more profitable subscriber segments?

These are the questions that are intelligently answered with policy solutions that pinpoint operators’ most profitable customers, and then enable operators to establish and enforce rules that enhance the customer experience for customers most likely to consume the types of services that drive loyalty and revenues.

Why compromise the quality of experience for the greater whole of users, who may suffer dropped connections and difficulties connecting to networks because of the heavy usage of a small percentage of people during peak hours and in congested cell areas?

Operators that want to get the most out of their 3G and LTE investments should continue on the quest to personalize services and content according to subscribers’ usage patterns, preferences, locations, and circumstances.

Operators need network analytics, and then can leverage real-time data from networks and subscriber data management (SDM) systems. This approach will help establish a strategy for balancing traffic in a way that optimizes the customer experience based on customer preferences and the value they place on the services. Central to that will be Policy solutions (PCRF), which define the rules for new services for different subscriber segments based on operator network requirements and marketing strategies.

While some operators may grow their subscribers based short term by bringing back unlimited data, the long-term profitability of operators – and the long-term role they will play as enablers in an OTT-driven model – will depend on their ability to stay the course in pursuing personalization of services. Those services will depend on dynamic charging and pricing models.

There’s no doubt there will be lots of statistics about the level of Olympic “engagement” over mobile devices and networks. My favorites: 60 percent of visits to the official London2012.com site and apps came from mobile devices, not to mention strong mobile figures reported by both the BBC (a third of web visits, a tenth of video streams) and NBC (16 percent of web users, 45 percent of video requests).

Social media was abuzz, with about 150M Olympic-related tweets! It got so intense, that Olympic organizers had to ask spectators to put their thumbs back in their pockets for a while, as TV coverage was disrupted when commentators could not get GPS data about cyclists’ positions for all the tweets, texts and pictures being sent by spectators. This of course caused said spectators to vent their frustration via…you got it, Twitter, thus causing more congestion.

While all of this minutia occupied white space in Reuters and many media channels’ Web pages, no one seemed to notice the lack of “personalization” – despite all the opportunity for it.

Perhaps everyone is really so engrossed by beach volleyball and swimming that no other sport really mattered, but I was searching like mad for the sports that mattered to me. For a fee, I could have streamed content, but I would have preferred to sit through a few humorous or heart-pumping Olympic advertisements for just a glimpse at highlights in the sports that resonated with me.

Perhaps Rio will be the “personalization” Olympics, where all the devices become true conduits of interesting and compelling content—perhaps even bi-directionally! How I’d like to tweet to my favorite boxer (use the left hook, use the left hook!).

To truly personalize the Rio games, operators will have to employ policy and subscriber data management solutions that determine in real-time who a person is, what device she is on, and to what network resources she is entitled for consuming certain types of content. These systems will also contain subscribers’ likes and dislikes, preferences and patterns of usage, etc.

Additionally, the relationship with OTT players and other third parties like mobile advertisers should be better managed so that shared policies and subscriber data are securely and effectively shared without compromising things important to individual people.

Perhaps by Rio, M2M and mobile payments will be far enough along that people in real time will be using devices, appliances and apps in ways not even imaginable today.

There was plenty of speculation before the Olympics that networks inside and out of the Olympic village would be taxed heavily enough to cause problems. Yesterday’s news that Olympic officials asked spectators and athletes to “take it easy” with Twitter traffic (as it was interfering with the GPS used to track competing cyclists) just added to the predictable, albeit at times “harsh” online criticism of the Joint Operators Olympic Group (JOOG). Of course, O2 and BT Group Plc (BT/A) and others in JOOG went to great lengths to accommodate the digital needs of the 6 million people expected to descend on Olympic park, preparing to carry 60 gigabits of data every second – four times that possible during the Beijing games – and using WiFi offload through 500,000 hotspots in Olympic Park and throughout London.

Despite some of the criticism around data speeds and overall performance, the work toward data detours and network buildouts has worked overall to accommodate the enormous number of streaming videos and photos traversing networks thus far. In fact, we wrote last week that these Olympics would serve as a “microcosm” for operators researching the potential impact of data surges on Diameter signaling.

The outages before the Olympics and the networks’ performance during the Olympics, are important analogies to what operators will face with the proliferation of smart devices and the impending explosion of Machine-to-Machine connections.

We will continue to analyze and address issues around network congestion, signaling storms and revenue opportunities as these trends pick up momentum.