DNS - Will Openwave 'Smart Policy' Help Make Regulatory Policy Smarter?

Openwave Systems (News - Alert) has announced its “Openwave Smart Policy,” a context-aware smart policy management solution that is designed to help operators better monitor and manage their network use at a user, device and application level, and addresses the rising tide of mobile broadband data consumption.

 

Since one would expect to hear much talk of products and tools that allow mobile operators to manage congestion and traffic on their networks, one has to wonder whether regulatory officials, mindful of all this activity, and its importance for management of mobile networks, would be so politically tone deaf as to destroy key segments of the mobile networks software business.

 

Openwave Smart Policy provides dynamic application-level policy rules to manage traffic. Managing traffic necessarily involves some degree of resource allocation at times of congestion. It is very hard to square those requirements with a strict, literal notion that “network neutrality” that literally forbids any sort of packet discrimination.

 

Though network neutrality rules are supposed to deal with business-focused implications of packet prioritization, it is difficult to clearly separate from network-driven resource management. Such bans on prioritizatioon also would make illegal or impossible features that business customers routinely apply to packets flowing over their private IP networks.