Embracing MVNOs and Connected Cars with Policy

We have had a great time meeting with customers and analysts this week at the Policy Control Conference. Kishen Mangat, Cisco’s Senior Director and General Manager of the Policy Business Unit, presented a keynote on Wednesday entitled “The Changing Mobility Business in the Age of Virtualisation.”

During his keynote, he touched on the topic from last week’s blog about how Service Providers are learning to expand their offerings with both additional services to existing subscribers and new ways to create business models and enter new markets. Traditional PCRF and the evolving Policy offerings like Cisco Policy Suite are helping our customers create those new business models today. He expanded more on some examples during his session, including both MVNOs and Connected Car.

K-Opticom, a MVNO in Japan, recently shared their story with Cisco. The operator decided to differentiate itself with mineo, a new mobile service that offers more customized plans at a fraction of the cost for each subscriber.

With Cisco Policy Suite, K-Opticom can now deliver an enjoyable user experience—and optimize network resources—by setting policies to suit a variety of customers and provisioning just the data they want to pay for. Cisco Policy Suite works with the Cisco ASR 5000 packet core connectivity solution, which combines massive performance and scale with flexibility, virtualization, and intelligence for the customer.

Cisco also issued a press release in early March with AT&T about the Connected Car solution. Other operators have begun working with car manufacturers to offer connected car services, including AT&T with OnStar, Vodafone and Porsche, and others.

Let me tell you a bit about how Cisco Policy Suite connects cars. Using Policy, operators can both properly prioritize and virtualize mobile data traffic for basic telematics and roadside assistance. At the same time, they can offer new services as well to consumers, whether it is information, entertainment, or even serve as a third party gateway for other OTT services.

Technologies like Policy, tied with the packet core, SON, and other mobile network infrastructure, can help to expand the revenue horizons of subscribers to markets that were unforeseen a few years ago. As we saw during this week’s Policy Control Conference, it’s an exciting time to adopt policy to embrace these new business models.

Learn more about Cisco Policy Suite and how it is being deployed with our customers.

Tweet for questions or comments at @CiscoSP360.

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