NP a game changer for manufacturers as well as operators – Samsung – Chile

By Patrick Nixon | Business News Americas
The introduction of number portability (NP) in Chile in mid 2011 will oblige not only operators to up their game to retain customers but also device suppliers to re-orient their product portfolio to suit new services, Aldo Vidal, Samsung Chile’s director for the cellular industry, told BNamericas.
On December 6, Chile’s President Sebastian Piñera signed a new number portability law. All that remains is for the government to select a company to manage the database. Telecoms regulator Subtel has said it plans to have NP up and running by the middle of next year to coincide with the entrance of two new mobile market players – VTR and Nextel – as well as auctions for 4G spectrum.
Vidal sees operators focusing on introducing innovative technologies, offering better and more sophisticated handsets and improved customer service.
“Companies in general, both operators and manufacturers, are going to have to look for new ways of creating customer loyalty than what they were doing before, basically with a higher level of quality of service,” Vidal said.
While mobile operators have been pushing mobile broadband and smartphones and fixed line companies have been offering converged service packages for some time now, all of that process is going to speed up and gain complexity with the heightened competition level.
NP “is going to reinforce that trend. People are going to look at who offers them a different smartphone or service. The customer ultimately looks not for a technology but for a service. Today the number of customers with smartphones is very small,” Vidal said, which implies a big space to grow.
Operators have different client segments, with some focusing more on prepaid and others on postpaid. As such, according to the executive, Samsung will have to provide a broad range of handsets to suit all needs and price bands while at the same time including new features that encourage consumers to spend more on value added services such as social networking access and video.
And while operators try to bring down the access cost of a smartphone through subsidies, the price of producing smartphones is coming down naturally through economies of scale.
In November, Samsung launched in Chile its Galaxy S model and Tab tablet – both based on the Android operating system.
As a member of The Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA), Samsung currently offers tablets, TVs, cell phones and cameras that conform with DLNA protocol which allows users to send videos, photos and music to their distinct devices.
DLNA is a non-profit collaborative trade organization comprising more than 250 member companies in the mobile, consumer electronics, PC, and service provider industries that is seeking to develop standards-based technologies to make it easier for consumers to share multimedia content.
And where Vidal sees operators really starting to differentiate themselves is through converged services. “One of the trends we’re going to start seeing next year is interconnectivity of the different screens in your home and interconnection of services,” he said.
Article vis Business News America