Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column. We’ve gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile industry to give their insights into the marketplace.
A dozen years ago, practically every presentation at a mobile conference had a slide forecasting wireless data growth taking off like a hockey stick. Today, another chart is making the rounds, and this picture isn’t pretty: Revenue growth from mobile services will be modest over the next several years, while operators’ cost of delivering those services will skyrocket.
New technologies such as LTE will help operators by lowering their cost per bit, but those savings are a drop in the bucket. To survive, let alone thrive, mobile operators must instead focus on increasing operational efficiency.
The good news is that it’s been done before. Over the past several decades, telcos and cable operators have automated their processes to achieve operational efficiencies upwards of 80% to 90%. One example is zero-touch provisioning of DSL, where the only human involvement in a new service is the customer placing the order on the operator’s website and then plugging in a new modem a day or two later.
In wireless, zero-touch handset provisioning is an obvious and relatively easy place to start increasing operational efficiency. Services are a much different story. For example, LTE supports multiple quality of serviec levels, so different subscribers to the same service might each get a different QoS level for business reasons. There also could be multiple bandwidth tiers, as well as multiple content providers, each with its own, unique business relationship with the operator. Those are just a few examples of how mobile services are becoming increasingly complex and why provisioning those services also is becoming more complex.
Developing an operational-efficiency strategy begins by segmenting mobile operations into three areas: plan to provision, order to cash and service to experience. A next-generation OSS enables operators to successfully execute that strategy.
Plan to provision: What do you really know about your network?
Plan to provision is a business process that begins with strategic and technical planning to determine network investments in capacity, geography and competitive features. The process involves lots of people, tools and time, which means there’s lots of room for error.
Another challenge is that all of the information necessary to make strategic and technical decisions is siloed in disparate inventory systems and organizations, and often available only via homegrown tools. A federated view of the network allows different department heads within an operator (e.g. head of planning and engineering) to make informed decision and provide accurate feedback to other teams (e.g. chief marketing officer). Operators could simply error on the side of caution by filling their base stations and warehouses with as many radios as they can afford, but excess capacity doesn’t generate revenue, so that strategy will be a tough sell to the CFO.
A smarter, more cost-effective strategy is to pull all of the necessary information – the number and location of deployed and spare radios, the backhaul capacity at each site and so on – from all of those disparate sources and put it in a central location that every department can access. Just as important, all of that information must be regularly updated to ensure that it’s always accurate. The right OSS tools can automate all of those processes to eliminate human error and free up personnel to focus on revenue-generating tasks.
Order to cash: One size doesn’t fit all
Provisioning a new customer used to be a simple process of activating a phone and adding that person to the home location registry. No more. Increasingly, each customer will have an array of choices of bandwidth, QoS, service tiers and content partners because the quality of experience, not sheer speed, will drive LTE’s monetization. Choices also foster customer loyalty, which is key because it’s far cheaper to retain and upsell a customer than to replace one.
With LTE, voice becomes another data application. Voice and video will require their own unique policy controls both for QoS and to maximize revenue opportunities. For example, a video content provider might be willing to pay operators a fee to increase bandwidth to customers of its service when they’re watching because it knows the enhanced viewing experience will help it attract and retain customers.
Those are just a few examples of why the era of one-size-fits-all is rapidly waning for both customers and services. But flexibility alone isn’t enough. Operators need the capability to automate that flexibility because there’s simply no other way to enable and charge for that many options, all in real time.
The need for automated real-time policy and charging tools is growing as operators phase out flat-rate, unlimited-use data plans, which are unsustainable in terms of network capacity and the bottom line. These tools help mobile operators avoid one of their nightmare scenarios – becoming a dumb pipe – by enabling them to add value in the eyes of their customers and third parties such as content providers.
Service to experience: End-to-end visibility benefits customers and the bottom line
Sometimes referred to as “trouble to resolution,” this category includes network alarms and customers calling about problems, as well as everything that goes with them, such as trouble tickets, truck rolls, KPIs and mean time to repair. The mobile industry has spent the past several years slowly shifting to a more proactive strategy because minimizing churn is key. By identifying potential problems before they become noticeable to customers, operators can significantly reduce overhead such as call center staff.
To achieve those benefits, operators need end-to-end visibility into the customer experience, from the core network through the RAN and even out to the apps on each device. That visibility should include information from roaming and Wi-Fi hotspot partners, as well as third-party partners such as content providers.
When customers do report problems, end-to-end visibility minimizes the time that CSRs and other staff spend tracking down the culprit by automatically collecting all of the network and device information about that customer. Faster resolutions improve customer satisfaction and enable staff to be more productive. Sometimes, the resolution can be an upsale opportunity. For example, if a business customer calls to complain about slow speeds, the operator could offer to upgrade her to a plan that has service level agreements that meet her needs.
Service to experience is similar to plan to provision in one respect: Improving operational efficiency in both categories requires OSS tools capable of pulling information that’s typically siloed in disparate systems and organizations. Those tools must be able to work in a multi-vendor, multi-technology and multi-network environment. Anything less won’t cut it.
That reality highlights the importance of getting OSS tools from a vendor that has a long, strong history in both wireline and wireless. That vendor’s expertise is key for achieving the operational efficiency that makes the difference between financial success and failure.
