Sandvine today identified three of its wireless ISP customers; GCI, Thumb Cellular and Carolina West Wireless are all using Sandvine’s network policy control to improve subscribers’ quality of experience.
Due to increased data usage on mobile devices, network policy control is now also being adopted by wireless carriers more and more in order to manage peak-time network traffic and allow all users to gain fair access to the Internet, the vendor explained.
Sandvine described GCI as a long-time customer that is often the first to adopt its new products. GCI is using Sandvine’s network policy control systems to detect network conditions that trigger policies within their fixed network to manage traffic congestion, improve connectivity and enhance subscribers’ Internet experience.
Thumb Cellular and Carolina West Wireless, meanwhile, are evolving the uses of network policy control in other ways for the introduction of service packages to increase subscriber satisfaction and improve network profitability, Sandvine reported.
Thumb Cellular in Michigan is using Sandvine for the deployment of bandwidth-based service tiers, which allows it to provide 3G data services.
Carolina West Wireless in North Carolina is using the Sandvine network policy control solutions’ device awareness capabilities to detect tethered devices. Device awareness offers visibility into which devices are on the network, what applications are driving their usage, what impact they are having on network resources and at what times of the day.
Tethering enables mobile users to go online from their laptop, by using a mobile smartphone as a modem. The use case drives up data consumption, which can create bill shock for the user and network congestion problems for the operator. Upon tethering detection, subscribers are prompted to opt-in to a service tier that matches their usage behavior, Sandvine explained.