Cellular News… Canadians Annoyed with Increasing Cell Phone Bills J.D. Power and Associates conducted a survey that examined Canadian wireless customers’ perceptions of their service, mobile phone and retail experience. The study revealed an average of 648 for overall satisfaction (on a 1,000-point scale) and an average of only 551 for satisfaction with cost of service. This could be attributed to rising monthly wireless costs, which have increased from an average of $71 in 2009 to $78 in 2011—and are being driven by the bump in smartphones and, consequently, larger data plans. According to the article, 39 percent of Canadian customersown a smartphone, a 25 percent increase from 2009, while the number of those who have a data package has increased to 60 percent from 15 percent in 2009.
To provide a superior customer experience and balance profitability, operators should offer progressive pricing options based on demand for speed and data consumption, for example. This is especially important because, according to Adrian Chung, senior manager at J.D. Power and Associates, the low satisfaction levels with cost of service have led to a high potential churn rate. In fact, 28 percent of customers strongly agree that they would consider switching to a new wireless service provider with offerings that better met their needs.
Billing & OSS World… Subscriber Data Management Exploding, Critical in Europe Infonetics Research recently found that the market for subscriber data management (SDM) tools for wireless networks is growing worldwide, particularly in Europe. The SDM market is seeing significant growth with mobile operators viewing the tools as critical for their wireless infrastructure-sharing initiatives; SDM allows them to identify which subscribers are using their networks. The article also notes that the machine-to-machine (M2M) market is important for SDM investment in Europe, and predicts that this too will become the case in North America over the next few years.
Analyst Shira Levine believes that, “as SDM strategies mature, operators will better leverage their subscriber data for functions such as customer care, campaign management, churn management, revenue assurance and marketing, and possibly to expand subscriber data sources to include IT systems, including CRM, billing and fulfillment.”
As Simo Isomäki previously noted, we too are seeing growing interest in using subscriber data for active decision-making in OSS/BSS. And while data management is still a challenge, there is no doubt that this intelligencewill help operators improve customer loyalty and safeguard profitability.
Light Reading… It’ll Be Cloudy in Dublin
Ray Le Maistre dwells on the location change from Nice to Dublin for this year’s Management World 2011, but looks forward to the event’s discussions around the deployment and support of cloud services. He states that, to play in this space, the first step will be building the physical infrastructure to support hosted applications and capabilities. Following this is the greater challenge of provisioning, activation, tracking, managing, guaranteeing and billing for those services against a service level agreement. This is a topic we’ll be exploring at Management World – both on the expo floor and in Forumville with the Enhanced Cloud Service Management Catalyst.
I am particularly excited about the Enhanced Cloud Service Management Catalyst, as it is the first to involve Comptel’s mediation and policy control solutions. Last year, we were primarily focused on fulfillment, with being responsible for orchestrating the delivery of hosted unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) services. Now, in the second phase, we’re also taking a key role in the monetisation of these services by capturing and rating usage and performance data from the infrastructure. It’s great to have this year’s project leveraging most of our software assets, and thus completing the Comptel Dynamic OSS loop.
What’s also interesting to note about this Catalyst—the same core set of applications traditionally used to manage mobile networks is being applied to UC&C in the cloud. For instance, just like the mobile world has gone through many changes in terms of the way subscribers pay for services, customers of UC&C solutions will be looking for pricing that accurately represents their usage levels—whether its billing for video and call usage per minute or per second, blended pricing where video usage doesn’t incur charges for the audio that accompanies it or different pricing for the host and participants. To achieve this service differentiation, operators of UC&C services can exercise flexible policy control and charging capabilities.
Management World 2011 attendees, if you’d like to demo the project, email comptel.marketing@comptel.com or visit the Enhanced Cloud Service Management Catalyst booth in Forumville.
For those unable to make it to Dublin, a whitepaper with more information on “The Criticality of Effective Service Management in Monetising Cloud-Based Collaboration Services,” is available for download.
(Scroll down for an English version of the following blog post.)
Otro Mobile World Congress ha terminado. Fue muy interesante poder observar que tantos operadores latinoamericanos habían realizado el viaje hasta Barcelona (y que me mantuvieron muy ocupados con muchas reuniones!) Mientras me preparaba para realizar mi viaje de regreso a Buenos Aires, pensaba respecto de cuales habían sido los temas y discusiones claves del evento y que significa esto para la región de CALA, hoy y a futuro.
Primero, la rápida adopción de Smartphones y Tablets en CALA, con certeza, está impulsando un crecimiento explosivo del tráfico de datos y está teniendo un impacto significativo en la manera que los operadores administran el ancho de banda, las suscripciones y combinan los planes tarifarios. Fue muy satisfactorio poder confirmar (nuevamente) que los usuarios desean pagar por nuevos y avanzados servicios como juegos, música, video-on-demand como así también la alta calidad de experiencia de usuario – obligando a los operadores a desplegar soluciones de Control de Políticas (Policy Control). Al menos la mitad de las más de 120 reuniones que habíamos mantenido durante los cuatro días el evento cubrían este tópico de soluciones OSS.
Latinoamérica todavía se encuentra en crecimiento a un muy buen ritmo en lo que respecta a penetración celular, de acuerdo al Sr. Daniel Hash, CEO de América Móvil (quien utiliza las soluciones de Comptel en cinco operaciones), hay unos 30 millones de personas por sobre los 15 años de edad que van a ingresar al mercado, impulsando el crecimiento hasta los 150 millones de abonados y duplicando la penetración de banda ancha en los próximos cinco años. Administrar todos estos nuevos clientes (y los servicios que se encontrarán disponibles para ese momento) puede definir o cambiar el rumbo de la carrera para ser el operador de servicios líder en la región. La buena noticia es que nosotros estamos más que en condiciones de ayudar a los operadores a alcanzar su meta.
Por último, mientras mi avión se está preparando para salir, me quede pensando sobre la nube (no la del cielo, sino la de cloud computing), que sin duda ya está aquí entre nosotros, y como despegaría en Latinoamérica. Muchas personas de los 20 países al sur del Rio Grande ya están accediendo al contenido utilizando una gran variedad de dispositivos y sistemas operativos distintos. El desafío de maximizar el control operativo y la confianza del usuario sigue sin embargo vigente. Afortunadamente Comptel ya está enfocado en permitir que los proveedores de servicios de comunicaciones puedan gestionar la nube de servicios, no solo haciéndolos posibles, sino también rentables.
Ahora que el Mobile World Congress ha terminado existen algunos pensamientos adicionales que nos hemos traído de regreso a nuestros hogares y que todavía no hemos compartido? Puedes dejar un comentario aquí.
A Latin American Perspective on Mobile World Congress
Another Mobile World Congress is over. It was great to see so many Latin American operators make the trip to Barcelona (and keep me very busy with meetings!). As I was getting ready to travel the 16 hours back to Buenos Aires, I was thinking about the key tradeshow themes and discussions, and what these mean for the CALA region today and in the future.
First, the rapid adoption of smartphones and tablets in CALA is certainly driving explosive growth in data traffic, and having a significant impact on the way mobile operators are managing their bandwidth, subscriptions and tiered service/price plans. It was nice to confirm (again) that consumers are willing to pay for advanced services like games, music and video-on-demand, as well as for a high Quality of Experience—revealing operators’ need to roll out policy control. At least half of the 120+ meetings we had over the four days at Mobile World Congress covered this OSS solution.
Latin America is also still growing at a very good pace in terms of wireless penetration; according to Mr. Daniel Hash, CEO of America Movil (full disclosure: the operator uses Comptel’s solutions in five countries), there are 30 million people over the age of 15 that will enter the market, driving growth to 150 million subscribers and doubling broadband penetration in the next five years. Managing all of those new customers (and the services that will be available by that time) will make or break the race for the top communications service provider in the region. The good news is that we are more than capable of helping operators meet this goal.
Lastly, as my flight was readying to leave, I pondered on Cloud, which is certainly here and taking off (no pun intended) in Latin America. People across the 20 countries south of the Rio Grande are accessing content on a variety of devices and operating systems. The key challenge of maximizing operational control and customer confidence remains. But Comptel has already been focused on enabling communications service providers to closely manage cloud services—not only making them possible, but profitable.
Now that Mobile World Congress has been wrapped up for a couple of weeks, are there any additional thoughts you took home but haven’t yet shared? Leave a comment here.
CommsMEA… Taking a Lead
Many countries in the Middle East are often criticised for the slow pace of reform in the telecom sector, but as editor Roger Field points out, the Gulf appears to be leading the way in one important aspect of telecom—roaming. At last month’s Roaming MENA Conference, one of the main discussion points concerned the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) roaming regulations, which intend to reduce the cost of roaming charges by placing a cap on the wholesale and retail roaming fees that can be charged between operators in the Gulf. The regulation has drawn some criticism from operators, and some have suggested that self regulation has already been achieved by simplifying roaming tariffs and giving end-users a clear indication of roaming fees. With more consumers using mobile data services, the issue of ‘bill shock’, especially as a result of roaming charges, has become of greater concern not just to regulators but also to operators themselves who are aware of the importance of quality of experience, which of course includes billing. Do you believe self-regulation is enough?
TM Forum Inside Leadership… Cloud Services: The Next Big Thing for Telcos
Keith Willetts, chairman and CEO of TM Forum, shares his thoughts on cloud services and the challenges telcos face with it. As he points out, many of today’s early cloud providers are product companies that are learning how to deliver complicated services. One would think that that telcos have the upper hand when it comes to delivering services because of their brand recognition, large volume of customers and resources to deliver services; however, according to Willetts, with those attributes comes a poor reputation of customer service, a history of exposing technical complexity (rather than hiding it), a tendency to be slow to make decisions, and the weight of regulations and government. The opportunity for telcos in the cloud is huge if they move quickly—not building the whole offering themselves—but rather putting in place delivery systems, customer support, etc. Cloud is a two-sided business model, where telcos can partner with cloud providers and act as a go-to-market service enabler. The example Keith uses in his article is that the telco could just provide the managed bandwidth that the cloud service needs. But it could also provide a lot of value—for example, providing the cloud store ‘front window’ (catalogs, etc.), security and authentication, and billing and customer care. What do you think of this kind of model / partnering? Do you see cloud being an opportunity for telcos?
Light Reading… Reflections on Barcelona: Decision Time for 4G
From a network perspective, the most striking thing emerging from this year’s Mobile World Congress was just how much the industry’s mindset has shifted from a 3G-oriented, hierarchical network architecture to a flat, all-IP architecture. But as analyst Patrick Donegan points out, the daunting scale of this upcoming architectural transformation cannot be overestimated. To keep the cost of running the network at a sustainable level, operators’ network planning, engineering and operations teams will have to design and deliver a network-wide transformation unlike anything they have ever been asked to deliver on before. Patrick compares this transformation to a house being refurbished. Previously, transformations of the mobile network were discrete, like redoing the bathroom or building an extension. The 4G transformation won’t allow anything like that. IP makes network boundaries and domains more porous, so that what you do in one domain necessarily impacts all other domains (not just adjacent ones). And it drives feature distribution, which in turn drives demand for new product types. This kind of transformation more closely resembles refurbishing an entire house while you’re still living in it. The need for coordination and alignment between work undertaken in one “room” and another is so much greater. Do you see this network transformation impacting quality of service, especially with more mobile data traffic?
I am attending the Cisco Live! event in London this week. For the first time in three years, the event is organised in London rather than Barcelona. Upon my arrival to ICC London ExCel today to set up our booth and demos, I found that the venue is showcasing Cisco’s technology and offering the “ultimate venue experience” by running on top of Cisco Catalyst® 6500 series, which supports data, wireless local area network, VoIP and IPTV services.
Some interesting things to note about the event as it gets underway:
This year’s World of Solutions Expo has more than 100 exhibitors registered—compared to 64 last year and 53 in 2009. There should be a lot more traffic in the exhibition hall—even before the show starts.
It is expected that nearly 4,000 IT professionals will attend this year’s Cisco Live! from 31 January to 3February, along with 2,000 participating virtually.
Cisco Live! is featuring hundreds of workshops—from breakout sessions to networking activities—relating to communications networks and service providers. And Cisco’s CEO John Chambers will present the keynote speech Tuesday morning.
Last month, Comptel and partners Cisco and Alcatel-Lucent led an interactive session at the Comptel User Group (CUG). (We also captured snapshots of it, as well as some of the presentations and attendee testimonials, in the following video.)
During the interactive session, we polled the approximately 100 telecom executives in attendance on their perceptions of new technologies, like cloud, LTE, M2M and third-party applications, and the consequential impact on communications service providers’ (CSPs) business models. After analysing the data, we wanted to share some of the interesting survey findings.
Nearly 60% of attendees considered LTE-enabled mobile broadband to hold the greatest potential for transforming CSP revenue models over the next 18 months. Interestingly, both the Cisco and Alcatel-Lucent representatives on the panel, when asked to comment, said that they see cloud and mobile data applications as the killer revenue drivers.
Meanwhile, some OSS/BSS industry analysts, like Teresa Cottam of Telesperience, made the point that the responses would be different if the CUG attendees were asked about the next 36 months.
So, we ran the vote again and saw that responses were much more fragmented; a third selected third-party applications and content, a little more than a quarter chose LTE-enabled mobile broadband, and only a share of votes went to M2M and cloud.
The conclusion from the panel and from other commentators was that LTE will lay the grounds for new business models, hence the short term (18 months) bet on it and the longer term belief in cloud, content and M2M.
Other feedback to the CUG survey revealed that:
In terms of revenue erosion, 60% of attendees thought that LTE-enabled mobile broadband will significantly wear down the revenues of fixed-line businesses, while 40% of respondents said that the impact would be marginal.
Three-quarters of respondents mentioned that they are either already working with third-party application and content providers (ACPs) or are planning to within the next 12 months. All respondents expected CSPs to be working with third-party ACPs within the next three to five years.
Finally, 97% of CUG attendees responded that cloud services will definitely generate revenues, but only 22% noted that these will be significant for CSPs. Most (59%) concluded that cloud services will result in relatively modest revenues for CSPs.
Overall, operators seem to be optimistic about the impact of new technologies but are unsure as to how these will translate into new revenue streams.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on the CUG poll results—do you agree or disagree with any of the findings?
Microsperience… Capacity crunch: It’s Not What You Think
Analyst Teresa Cottam looks at the truth behind the capacity crunch and why it is somewhat misunderstood. She believes that the term “capacity crunch” is a complete misnomer and disguises what the real problem is—not increased network traffic. Rather, Teresa says, “traffic is rising, capacity is being consumed, and we’re not making sufficient incremental revenues to compensate for this usage or justify further investment.” If revenues were going up along with the traffic, we would have a pure play engineering challenge. The difficulty is, of course, that revenues are not increasing in line with traffic; so not only do we have an engineering challenge, we also have business, operational and customer challenges. Customers require adequate Quality of Service and desire greater capacity and faster speeds, but in many countries, the business case for continual network investment may be far from clear cut.
Connected Planet… Mobile Operators Brace for Bill Shock Proposal
Joan Engebretson reports on the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) plans to introduce a proposal that attempts to help prevent wireless “bill shock”. This has been a hottopic for some time now, and becoming even more of an issue in the U.S. with Verizon admitting that its customers had been erroneously charged more than $50 million for wireless data services. The proposal reportedly will require carriers to warn users when they are close to reaching voice, text or data limits or about to incur roaming charges. Carriers are opposing these regulations and arguing that they are not needed. Most certainly, they are concerned about potential lost revenue—particularly if the FCC requires them to give customers the opportunity to have service automatically shut off when they reach a certain usage level. According to news reports, the plans would not impose that requirement, but the FCC will seek input on whether it should do so.
Billing & OSS World… Cloud Services Will Change Customers’ Service Expectations
Charlene O’Hanlon blogs about a new report by IDC that shows as more companies adopt cloud, service providers will be forced to change from their traditional, labour intensive service delivery models to an asset-based one. According to a study, the change in business models will arise as a result of the industry’s move towards outsourced cloud services and the accompanying performance and relationship expectations of customers. The increased use of new delivery models, such as cloud services and SaaS, will change customer expectations regarding the performance of their providers and subsequently change their relationships with providers. Service providers will need to develop road maps that show how customers are looking to adopt these utility-based services that cut across entire organization requirements. Additionally, many outsourcers and providers will need to make major adjustments to their delivery capabilities, partnership ecosystems, business models and service offerings, and will need to examine their roles and positions within and beyond the traditional IT and business process services market.
Here at Comptel’s Sao Paulo office, we are getting all geared up for next week’s Futurecom, which will be taking place in our home town. Futurecom is one of the most important events of the year, not just for Brazil but for the whole region. It welcomes approximately 15,000 people (many of them decision-makers as presidents, directors and managers from both the vendor community and communications service providers) from across approximately 40 countries.
Futurecom offers delegates the opportunity to see some of the region’s greatest personalities in the world of communications, who will be giving presentations about their companies, views, trends, best practices, lessons learned and more. Often, these generate a fairly large audience discussion, as the primary format of the event is panel-based; speakers make brief presentations on particular themes, and after that, they get together for heated debates to dig deeper into these communications topics.
On Wednesday, October 27 at 2:40 Brazil time in IT Arena Pavilion A, Comptel will be giving one of these talks, in conjunction with our partner Cisco. We’ll be diving into the opportunities and challenges cloud presents for communications service providers and enterprise customers, as well as our participation in several TM Forum Catalyst projects.
There is also an exhibition area, where key suppliers and operators show their latest product and solution innovations. Indeed, Comptel has a booth at the event (#B2), where we will be showcasing our Comptel Dynamic OSS, and in particular, focusing on service fulfilment and policy control and charging.
We can’t wait to meet existing and prospective customers and partners. Get in touch with us at americas@comptel.com if you would like to schedule an appointment!
Scott Stewart CIO Blog… Telcos Could Rule the Clouds Scott Stewart, blogger, CIO and cloud computing consultant, highlights a recent blog post by Chirag Mehta that discusses the massive opportunities that telcos (large and small) have in the cloud computing space, and shares his thoughts about how telcos can be well-positioned to provide and distribute virtualized desktops, infrastructure as a service, software as a service, voice, video, cloud-based enterprise applications and productivity tools. The premise of Stewart’s post is his experience of putting together a business case for cloud computing—it was discovered quickly that the telco model was favored (out of public, private, hybrid, etc.) and tagged by his business as the ‘trusted cloud’ model. Why is this? Because with the telco model, you are able to deliver the full benefits of a cloud-based subscription model, but without the dependency of the Internet. Under this model, you are still able to provide the economies of scale with shared services and multi-tenanted cloud—but delivered over a secure, private, high availability network. Stewart believes telcos are so well-equipped for cloud computing because many have already been through multiple evolutions of upgrading their networks to the latest protocols and architectures, and most already have advanced knowledge of cloud architecture and operate modern service delivery platforms. What are your thoughts on telcos and cloud computing? It was certainly a hot topic at our User Group—check out Bob Machin’srecap of the roundtable discussion.
Microsperience… When the “Best” System is Not Good Enough
As part of Microsperience’s series on sourcing telecoms BSS and OSS, analyst Teresa Cottam looks at some of the common limitations and pitfalls when evaluating BSS/OSS in her post. She highlights a frequently overlooked point: that the “best” system may not be the right system for you. Most people’s concept of “best” is related to function; that is, the range of complexity of functions the system can perform. As Teresa discussed in her recent post BSSOSS: Buy in haste, repent at leisure, there is too much emphasis when buying BSS/OSS on the technical features of the systems and not enough on other factors. People often believe that capturing all of the possible features required now and in the future is a good starting point to map vendors and evaluate their offerings. In fact, it can lead to extended and inefficient tendering processes, additional cost, frustration and sometimes completely the wrong decisions being made. In Teresa’s opinion, the very worst approach is to have extensive feature requirements without any attempt to weigh them intelligently. When a fully-functional system is in place you rarely find that the CSP implements all of the functions they seemed so concerned with when selecting the system. The key takeaway from Teresa’s post is that there is no overarching ideal solution to CSPs’ business problems. Each business has a legacy position, different objectives and challenges, and therefore different requirements. What is great for one business may not be great for another.
Light Reading… Data Surge Fuels Policy Control Boom
The market for telecom network policy control servers is booming as CSPs scramble to manage the growing volumes of data running over their networks. According to research conducted by HeavyReading, operators are aiming to use their policy control platforms to develop new charging models and develop tiers of services, so they can move away from the flat-rate mobile data models that currently prevail. More than 70 network operators were surveyed about what prompted their decisions to deploy policy servers or Policy Charging and Rules Function (PCRF). Some of the report’s key highlights include:
More than 80 percent rated the option “Enable us to apply ‘fair use’ management techniques to better handle network congestion” as either critical or important.
80 percent also cited “Enable us to offer tiered or customized services to different classes of customers or to individual customers” as either critical or important.
More than 75 percent picked out “Improve our ability to meter and charge customers for service features and attributes” as either critical or important.
And almost the same number identified policy servers’ ability to help carriers “improve quality and depth of network traffic and applications reporting and analysis” as either critical or important.
Graham Finnie, Heavy Reading’s chief analyst, says the key to making the most of policy servers is to be able to change policy conditions/rules without requiring the vendor to rework the code, and to have them interconnected with a number of other key network and SPIT elements.
At the ComptelUserGroup last week, a number of the communications industry’s issues du jour were offered to the delegates for roundtable discussion. Amongst the most popular was the topic of cloud services.
It’s a subject which has not exactly suffered from neglect this year, but nonetheless, it was interesting to hear it discussed between communications service providers (CSPs) and network specialists (such as Comptel partners IBM, Cisco and Alcatel Lucent)—people who have a real and pressing interest in how cloud will play out as a credible service for CSPs as well as a possible new revenue source for equipment and software suppliers.
The attention of the group was quickly caught by the question of how big an opportunity cloud could be for telcos.
There is little doubt that cloud services are going to be big and in great demand—the business case is easy to make, in terms of both cost savings and business flexibility. Furthermore network and virtualisation technologies are making cloud increasingly viable. This will continue with the roll out of 4G, which will make access to cloud-based services ubiquitous across fixed and mobile networks.
And no one questions that carriers have some real competitive advantages to exploit in the cloud services market, particularly through their command of the communications network and their influence and control over the quality of delivery.
So cloud services for telcos—it’s all good? Well maybe.
Our delegates raised an issue which we don’t believe has been widely discussed—exactly how evident are telco advantages to the addressable market? Telcos know the value of their technology, but to what extent is it a differentiator for the average customer? After all, it’s hard to value what you don’t understand. Are SMEs aware of the difference between ‘smart pipe’ and ‘dumb pipe’? Do they know (or care) how little influence the IT- or Internet-based provider can have over the quality of service (QoS)? Do they understand the difference that QoS will make to the reliability of their connection?
Telcos undoubtedly have great advantages in the provision of cloud services, but there’s still a lot of education to be done to sell those advantages to the market. Now, as we move out of the early-adopter phase, telcos must grab that all-important mindshare.
1,000-point scale) and an average of only 551 for satisfaction with cost of service. This could be attributed to rising monthly wireless costs, which have increased from an average of $71 in 2009 to $78 in 2011—and are being driven by the bump in smartphones and, consequently, larger data plans. According to the article, 39 percent of Canadian customersown a smartphone, a 25 percent increase from 2009, while the number of those who have a data package has increased to 60 percent from 15 percent in 2009.
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