Q: How can you develop competitive yet profitable services with pricing models that increase customer satisfaction?

A: By leveraging the insight into subscriber and application usage gained from the Arbor Ellacoya eSeries solution to design services and pricing based on usage quotas.

Many network service providers rely on subscriber usage quotas to control costs and increase revenue. But determining where to set these quotas is often a trial-and-error process based on incomplete or anecdotal data. Without the ability to measure usage on a per-subscriber and per-application basis, such quotas are hit-or-miss.

Intelligent Quota Management, Based on Subscriber and Application Usage
The Arbor Ellacoya eSeries solution enables you to understand which subscribers and applications consume excessive capacity and cause congestion. Armed with this insight, you know where you should set usage caps, which subscribers are likely to exceed various quotas and by how much.

With the eSeries, you can create new service plans based on usage quotas that reflect actual customer needs. You can attach these quotas to your broadband services as a whole or to individual applications like peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing, video streaming and e-mail. You can also track subscribers’ exact usage patterns based on bytes.

Not only can you set usage thresholds, you can act on them. Whenever an overage occurs, your back-office system is automatically alerted, enabling you to bill extra or suspend service. You can tailor your services and pricing to better match customer preferences, capture additional revenue and increase profits.

Flexible Usage-Based Billing Options
Through its in-depth usage reports, the eSeries provides a new level of flexibility in usage-based billing, including the option of applying “penalty box” policy changes when subscribers exceed their usage quota. Rather than restricting an over-user’s bandwidth for all applications at all times, the eSeries usage reports might suggest more subscriber-centric approaches, such as:

• Adding application awareness to the quota, enabling you to bill for heavy-use applications while allowing unlimited Web browsing and e-mail, or letting you exclude applications like IPTV to avoid double billing.
• Adding on-net and off-net awareness to the quota, allowing you to bill only for off-net usage.
• Adding time-of-day awareness to the quota, enabling you to bill only for usage during peak hours.

• A centralized database from which results can be extracted to correlate with data from other database, back-office and operational support (OSS) systems.
• The ability to collect very granular data that is then processed for summary data as it ages.
• Total network visibility offering views at the network-wide, regional, site, switch, CMTS/BRAS, subnet or subscriber level.