Managing hierarchically organized subscriber profiles

A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium tangibly embodying a set of instructions, which when executed by one or more processors of a telecommunications system of the broadband service provider, cause the one or more processors to perform a method comprising:

• defining each of a plurality of service contexts available to a plurality of subscribers of the broadband service provider in terms of one or more profile identifiers of a plurality of profile identifiers each of which is representative of a particular subscriber service context supported by a broadband subscriber access environment provided by the broadband service provider;
• maintaining, within a virtual router (VR) configured within the telecommunications system of the broadband service provider, a scalable subscriber profile database in which a memory requirement for the scalable subscriber profile database is dependent upon a number of available service contexts by hierarchically organizing the plurality of profile identifiers as intermediate profile identifiers and leaf profile identifiers, wherein the leaf profile identifiers explicitly define subscriber services that are available during a connection to the broadband service provider and the intermediate profile identifiers indirectly represent sets of one or more subscriber services, which are defined by way of the intermediate profile identifiers' associations with one or more lower-level identifiers including zero or more of the leaf profile identifiers and zero or more of the intermediate profile identifiers;
• receiving a connection request from a subscriber of the broadband service provider, wherein the connection request contains therein a profile identifier of the plurality of profile identifiers;
• determining one or more subscriber services available to the subscriber while the subscriber is connected to the broadband service provider by querying the scalable subscriber profile database to identify one or more of the leaf profile identifiers associated with the profile identifier;
• and
• creating a connection for the subscriber that enables processing of packets received from the subscriber in accordance with the one or more subscriber services.