Mobile Broadband Traffic Management and QoS Prioritisation

Table of Contents

• 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