Mobile broadband traffic management and QoS prioritisation

Executive summary
In a nutshell
Ovum view
Traffic management will become increasingly important
QoS prioritisation provides a way to differentiate mobile broadband service offerings
Prioritisation will be used in conjunction with fair-usage policies to control data-heavy users
Application and service prioritisation opens up new business models
Net neutrality questions will emerge
Scope of research
Prioritisation and QoS are high on operators’ radars
Numerous factors have led to recent interest in QoS prioritisation
Extreme traffic growth
Desire to manage heavy users
Need to optimise use of network resources
Ability to differentiate further on services and pricing structures
Need to ensure specific applications or services function well
QoS prioritisation still nascent among mobile operators
Net neutrality will be an issue
Use of lower-priority QoS in conjunction with fair-usage policies
Five options to control usage once fair-usage limits reached
Option 1: do nothing
Option 2: throttling
Option 3: additional charging
Option 4: throttling with policy control
Option 5: lower user priority
Prioritising premium users with QoS packages
Providing the best possible user experience
Prioritising realtime traffic and applications based on QoS
De-prioritising peer-to-peer
Application or service prioritisation
Operators’ own services or applications
Third-party services or applications
Background services to fill up spare capacity
Moving demand to different times or locations
Service filtering, data compression and content adaption
Data and service optimisation
Disallowing or blocking services or content
There are dangers with filtering content




List of Tables
Table 1: Options for controlling heavy users
Table 2: Possible Gold, Silver and Bronze mobile broadband package structure






List of Figures
Figure 1: Mobile data use in Hong Kong
Figure 2: De-prioritisation of P2P traffic during time of congestion