Huawei Narrowly Edges Ericsson for the Top Position for the Quarter
According to Exact Ventures, the Policy Server/PCRF market grew 37 percent compared to 3Q14, to $202 million. We expect that market growth grow by greater than 20 percent for both 2015 and 2016 and that the market will approach $1 billion for 2016.
In North America and elsewhere, carriers are continually revising and ‘one-upping’ each other regarding their data plans. T-Mobile USA recently introduced their ‘Binge On’ video plan whereby video from over 20 popular services, like YouTube and NetFlix, streams free to certain subscribers. That is, it does not count against your data plan. Features like ‘Binge On’ are enabled by the PCRF which informs the billing system not to charge for those bits of traffic that are identified as one of the services specified as part of the plan.
Moreover, now that many operators are actively deploying VoLTE, and in some cases with video, prioritizing that traffic above all else is key to maintain and assure high quality of service. Specifically, VoLTE traffic is assigned a quality class identifier (QCI) value of 1, which guarantees a specific bit-rate, minimal packet delay (latency) and packet loss. The PCRF is the functional node within an operator’s network responsible for setting the QCI values for each mobile application.
During the quarter, Huawei became the largest PCRF vendor by more than doubling revenues year-over-year to $62 million, narrowly edging Ericsson which grew nearly 50 percent versus 3Q14. Huawei is very strong it its domestic market and other developing regions of Asia Pacific and EMEA where mobile data services are increasingly popular and operators are increasingly sophisticated about segmenting its targeted customers via tiered-data and sponsored data plans.
Vendors Covered in the report include:
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