What's the first thing that comes to mind when someone talks to you about Policy? Chances are, you think of rules and regulations telling you about what you cannot do while on a mobile app or online. You don't think about Policy as a way to set you free or a way for your Service Provider to make things better for you.

Graham Finnie from Heavy Reading discusses in his new whitepaper, "Policy as a Platform: Delivering Agility & Simplicity," how policy and charging control has come a long way in a few short years.

While past generations of policywas limited to less than five functions dictated by the IT staff and a limited number of transactions, today's policy has a lot more flexibility and policies are now created by the marketing department. In fact, the increased interest and adoption of virtualization in policy networks now means that the number of use cases has expanded to over 20 use cases and the number of transactions that can be handled is extensible.

These use cases can be as simple as optimizing the network for fair usage and roaming to end user value-added services such as shared data usage plans for families, "happy hour" pricing, video optimization, and real-time RAN congestion for a better end user experience. Policy is also becoming an important factor as service providers consider upgrading their voice networks to support VoLTE. The research shows that more operator expect that they will need to upgrade their PCRF (Policy and Charging Rules Function) solution to support VoLTE.

A new kind of policy platform is emerging that is better positioned to meet telcos' new strategic imperatives and enable the service providers to seamlessly link network and service platforms. Policy now sits at the is parts of a set of virtualized functions, making increasingly sophisticated, contextual decisions on behalf of end users like you and me.

Download the full Policy Charging Control report here:

Learn more about Cisco Policy Suite for Service Providers here: (www.cisco.com/go/mobilepolicy)

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