SDP 2014 - The 3rd Workshop on Smart Data Pricing (SDP)

Demand for data in both wired and wireless broadband networks is 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. Consequently, Smart Data Pricing (SDP) has been playing a major role in the future of mobile, broadband, and content. 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 extension of the above. SDP can help create happier consumers and enterprise users, less congestion, and 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, effective user interface designs, field trials, and a combination of smart ideas, smart execution, and smart policy.
The SDP workshop has a history of nurturing multidisciplinary research by bringing together academics and practitioners from top Universities, research labs (like Microsoft Research, INRIA), service providers (like AT&T, Korea Telecom, Telefonica), hardware vendors (Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, Microsoft, Cisco), and representatives from US FCC and the National Exchange Carrier Association. Likewise, the 3rd workshop on SDP will provide an interdisciplinary platform for researchers in engineering, economics, and business schools, to exchange novel ideas to jointly address the challenges and opportunities presented by the recent explosive growth in demand for broadband data.