The Broadband 'New World Order'

As companies like TATA in India and Oi in Brazil make moves toward truly personalized data packages, the question emerges of how "a la carte" can things get and how fast?

The bottomline is it won't be enough to just sell tiers, or to sell upgrades to people. Additional services should constantly be added, and they have to be increasingly personalized. If a person is vacationing or visiting relatives and is willing to pay for on-demand, value-added services for a short period of time, why not enable it? Well, part of the problem is the transition from data tier plans to personalized data packages will require technological changes around extra policies and the ability to do real-time changes of how networks function, and to control latency and volume limits on the fly. Many policy solutions in use today were implemented before demands for scalability and performance got to current levels. And, most do not integrate with online-charging capabilities.

To really allow for real-time, on-demand services that are personalized, online charging and policy have to come together so that sophisticated charging for new services and upgrades can take place in a very high-volume environment.