SP Achieves Regulatory Compliance on Time and On Budget with Allot Smart Data Source
About the Tier-1 Service Provider
As a fully-integrated, info-communications company in a competitive market, this leading Tier 1 Service Provider offers a full range of information, communications and entertainment services for both consumer and corporate markets. The Service Provider’s mobile network provides 4G/LTE, 3G, and 2G services.
Challenge
The Tier 1 Service Provider was three-years into a regulatory compliance project for data sourcing that had hit a plateau due to lack of technical capabilities and professional services. To get the project back on track, the customer was in dire need of a granular DHCP gleaning and business intelligence solution that could format data usage records per data collection and formatting requirements of the regulator. In addition, the Service Provider wanted to leverage this valuable network data to advance marketing and network operation projects. It was decided that this big data sourcing and analytics project would serve three stakeholders:
- Regulatory Compliance: Rich data records for regulatory compliance to be delivered in under four months
- Marketing: Big data analytics mainly for marketing use cases and information brokerage
- Network Operations: Network data insights that would be utilized both for operations management, network planning, and business units
Solution
SmartVisibility was chosen as the baseline of the customized Allot solution, for its ability to capture customized data fields and a rich variety of contextual application, user, endpoint, and video usage statistics. After deploying a few dozen Allot Service Gateways (SG) at fixed network sites, the SGs were configured to relay real-time data records to our Data Mediator. From there, data was formatted into records which were exported to two main destinations:
- The Service Provider’s data warehouse (Hadoop)
- The Allot ClearSee Analytics product; utilized by the network planning unit
With help from Allot’s Data Science Services team, the Tier-1 Service Provider realized they collected data per IP address instead of per subscriber ID, which made it difficult to analyze subscriber behavior correctly. By installing Allot’s Subscriber Management Platform (SMP) they gained the necessary subscriber awareness for each data transaction.
The project was a success on many levels, due to the customized categorization we were able to provide:
- URL Categorization: Allot professional services customized HTTP browsing records per specific URL categories required for marketing purposes and traffic analysis.
- Application Categorization: In addition to Allot’s advanced, out-of-the-box application categorization, the Service Provider required customized categories with specific levels of application granularity to be included in the data sets. This was achieved through expert insight from the Allot onsite team.
- Metadata Extraction: A highlight of the project was the ability for the Service Provider to extract real-time search engine metadata that was previously inaccessible. Allot extracted this metadata and formatted it for seamless and scalable use by existing operational system and marketing teams.
- Formatting: Allot completely customized the format of the data source records, so they could be exported directly to the existing data warehouse. This allowed new network data to be introduced with ease and without having to alter DWH and BI systems in any way, saving time and money for the Service Provider.
- Discovering new kinds of data: The Service Provider was introduced to new information which they had no access to beforehand such as device usage, video QoE parameters such as session start/stop, video stalls, video duration, and other valuable statistics.
Allot ClearSee Network Analytics was also leveraged as part of the solution, providing a full dashboard of visual reports and analysis of bandwidth consumption, application usage, traffic patterns, etc. to better plan for network upgrades, maintenance, and other principle activities. In addition, they complement the dashboard with customized reports provided by Allot Data Science Services.
Benefits
Allot’s comprehensive policy control and charging solutions enable the global CSP to reap important business benefits every day as it:
- Differentiates prepaid services and revenue
The global CSP’s ability to offer zero-rating on one, few, or many applications, made its prepaid service more attractive than competing plans, increasing prepaid service uptake and loyalty.
- Stops revenue leakage
The global CSP countries save hundreds of thousands of dollars per month in revenue leakage, which over time, could have increased to even greater losses with a significant impact on profitability.
- Fosters a prepaid-to-postpaid migration path
Fast uptake of prepaid application-based services enabled the global CSP to advance its goal of growing the customer relationship and migrating prepaid users to postpaid plans that also offer zero-rate applications at competitive price points.
