The 5th Workshop on Smart Data Pricing (SDP)

Demand for data in both wired and wireless broadband networks are almost doubling every year, inducing Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to use pricing both as a congestion management tool and a revenue generation model. This changing landscape is evidenced by the elimination of flat-rate plans in favor of $10/GB usage based fees in the US and various other countries in Asia and Europe. More recently, new monetization approaches are taking off, such as the Sponsored Content plans from AT&T and other Asian telcos, and new peering agreements between content providers and service providers are being formed. The rise of Ad-blockers is also affecting many economic relationships. Consequently, Smart Data Pricing (SDP) is playing a major role in the future of mobile, broadband, and content distribution networks. SDP can refer to (a) time/location/app/congestion dependent dynamic pricing, (b) usage based pricing with throttling/booster, (c) WiFi offloading/proactive caching, (d) two-sided pricing/reverse billing/sponsored content, (e) quota-aware content distribution, (f) shared data pricing, and any combination or extensions of the above. SDP can help create happier consumers and enterprise users, less congestion, better Quality of Experience, lower CapEx/OpEx, higher revenue/profit margin, less churn, more consumption and ad revenue to content/app providers. But it also requires developing pricing models that capture the interplay between technical and economic factors, interfaces among network providers and content/app providers, field trials, and a combination of smart ideas, smart execution, and smart policy.