New ghost in town"PCRF" for telecom giants in India

Since launch of 3G services every strategist and research firms reports has been talking about,backbone data network explosion due to high BW and data consuming applications.
Other thing was to managing traffic intelligently to get maximum out of limited network resources. (providing regulated QoS as per application and customer).

So with these predictions operators have started looking for entity who can handle these issues.

The obvious answer was an functional entity from IMS network (NGN ) framework that is PCRF(Policy and Charging Rule function). PCRF is an functional block in IMS framework and not an device or network element with defined function and boundary.

PCRF is collection of elements which will include many subsystems like policy manager with administrator, subscriber repository and trigger manager (for communication with network)

So as per IMS framework, its upto designer how he implements the PCRF functionality. Indian operators have started implementation of PCRF functionality in networks, with 3G roll out itself.

However many are struggling with this new ghost in town ,because of misconceptions about PCRF, lack of long term vision for cellular networks and lack of readiness of tailor made solutions by OEMs(manufacturers).

Some of the operators have got this PCRF as a COTS product (like Black box) , no one knows what it can do. There are challenges in implementation because this function need some BSS data of customer (Billing info, customer category, preferences) to do an network monitoring and controlling.
So integration between BSS systems with PCRF is very difficult as everyone was treating OSS/BSS and network systems are different silos with one narrow interface of provisioning.

After integrating PCRF in network ,now next challenge is use cases which operators business team wants to implement and what COTS vendor is offering.

Because there are many so called killer use cases like URL based charging and QoS assignment,
Parental control, Real time speed and session monitoring.
Which are still not matured and getting trail and error-ed in operator network.