February 2019 – In 4Q18, the worldwide policy and charging rules function (PCRF) market grew 32 percent sequentially and 31 percent versus the same quarter in 2017. Such large growth was due to order volatility and, to a lesser extent, seasonal spending patterns.

For the full-year 2018, the PCRF market grew 9 percent. Operators continue to invest in PCRF to support classic policy use-cases such as quality-of-service (QoS) and traffic prioritization for applications like VoLTE and supporting quota management and other tiered data, voice and messaging services. Network modernization projects involving virtual- and cloud-based systems that will support 5G in the future are also increasingly fueling investments.

Huawei ended the quarter with one-third of the market, even with 3Q18. Huawei continues to be 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. Due to seasonal factors, Ericsson’s PCRF revenues rose very strongly on a sequential basis and the second position for the quarter. During the quarter, Cisco’s PCRF revenues also grew strongly and the company was essentially tied with Ericsson for the second position. Cisco has a very strong presence in North American core networks, which helped to boost their results for the quarter. Nokia continues to gain policy market share and has won some large Tier-1 accounts in North America and EMEA. During the quarter, the company grew its policy revenues 31 percent sequentially, and was the fourth largest vendor for the quarter.

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Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF)