Blog | Sandvine

People spend as much as 13 hours and 11 minutes/day using some type of digital media. This digitization of life is enabled by you, the global operators, who’ve been making the capital expenditures necessary to keep up with rising data demands, but without the ROI and profitability margins needed to make it sustainable.

After taking the time to analyze and optimize your networks, you have to monetize. That means personalizing experiences by putting a value on the many dimensions of quality-of-experience (QoE) you deliver – the ones that matter most to your customers, and the ones you can consistently deliver, prove, and bill for:

Different QoE dimensions affect people in different ways. If someone’s just browsing the Web, watching on-demand short-form videos, sending emails, and posting on social media, their QoE is less sensitive to network performance than other users. For example, gamers care a lot about lag and whether their graphics-intensive animations and response times are instantaneous; 4K live streamers care about whether their full streaming experiences are truly high-def; stock traders care about whether their purchases or sales instantly go through; remote and hybrid workers care if their audio and video synch up on their conferences with colleagues or customers; enterprises care about whether they are getting the performance expected out of SLA-based services, Private Networks, FWA, Cloud and Edge ecosystems.

As aggregators of content, you have an opportunity to personalize plans around actual usage and the quality-of-experience you deliver. The heaviest users on your network make up about 10% to 15% of the whole, so making sure they are satisfied and paying for what they are using is key to ensuring you can also deliver optimal QoE for all your other customers – and at a reasonable cost to them, with a reasonable margin for you. Wastefully overprovisioning your network resources to meet the demands of one-size-fits-all and “unlimited data” plans is not a good long-term strategy. You have to get to a point where you can more surgically commit network resources when and where they are needed most. Managing heavy usage can ensure fairness and a better QoE for the largest number of subscribers, and can help defer CapEx, while lowering OpEx and improving revenue.

Thanks to increasingly sophisticated ML algorithms and analysis, it's possible to distinguish between authentic traffic and traffic masquerading as something else – the type of visibility that not only reveals how customers are using their applications, but that also helps you combat fraud and security challenges.

This is particularly important now that about 60% of overall network capacity, as we will show in our upcoming 2024 Global Internet Phenomena Report, is attributable to the large application and content providers, such as Alphabet, Meta, Netflix, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, TikTok, Disney. As CTO Alexander Haväng wrote recently, you ultimately need the power to negotiate fair-share financial models and cost distributions that recoup some of network costs that go into sustaining these increasingly large, sophisticated ecosystems and applications.

Sandvine Approach to Monetization 

To monetize QoE, you need to accurately identify the application traffic traversing the network, and the content within the applications.

That’s what we do. We use the industry’s most sophisticated machine-learning analytics to classify applications, as well as the content within those applications.

When our customers understand how their subscribers are using their favorite applications, it becomes possible to build QoE-based, device-based, and usage-based bundles that monetize the QoE dimensions most important to different types of subscribers. Personalizing offerings to actual usage improves subscriber sentiment about your brand, and increases the likelihood customers will try new services and offerings.

Monetization, from a Sandvine point-of-view, is a two-prong topline and bottom line approach for reducing revenue leakage while also creating new revenue streams. Each pre-built Use Case software module helps you automate deployment and shorten time to ROI.

Our monetization Use Cases include: 

• Usage-Based Services - use application data to offer QoE-based and/or usage-based services tailored to the needs of different subscribers
• Zero Rating and Application-Based Plans - monetize key app categories, zero-rate roaming traffic for intl customers, bespoke plans that balance demands with bandwidth, enhance QoE by prioritizing certain app cateogires during their peak hours
• Video and TV Fraud Management - identify devices, apps and services driving piracy; protect from piracy, malware and viruses, and identify hi-demand channels and content unavailable through licensed means; respond to piracy threats and trends
• Parental Control - deliver reliable service that meets sub expectations, reduce Opex around customer care with self care portals, flexibility for customers to manage their account, facilitate easy self configuration, personalized services at a network level
• Interconnect Bypass Fraud Management - avoid fines and penalties around regulations, improve bottomline with better service to subscribers; build trust by ensuring privacy and security; mitigate VoIP fraud and recognize legitimate revenue; inform network security investments
• OTT Usage Audit Billing Reconciliation
• M2M Connectivity Management (connectivity, security)
   

All of these Use Cases are designed for visibility into how applications are being used over networks so our customers can develop personalized, value-added services, as well as application-based and usage-based plans.

Accuracy in how you charge and bill helps you improve customer satisfaction and increases the likelihood customers will try new services. Calculations at 250ms intervals means you can “score” App QoE through the lens of 14 app categories. This accuracy and speed help inform new services.

And, the ability to calculate charges for any transaction type, in real time, shortens time-to-cash and enables omni-monetization.

We continue to improve and expand our capabilities in our Analyze, Optimize, and Monetize Use Cases. To learn more about how we can help you accelerate time to revenue and shorten ROI, check out our recent webinar, "Personalized Network Experiences: The Key to Future Monetization Success". Also, feel free to schedule a demo or contact us for more information.