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.
According to a recent Accenture survey of customers worldwide from a variety of industries, the greatest source of frustration is “having a company deliver something different than what they promise upfront.”
While all companies offer slightly different promises to their stakeholders, every brand operating within the mobile space must first and foremost deliver on the promise of mobility expected by the more than six billion subscribers worldwide: that their access to service is simple and interoperable anywhere, anytime. By doing so, mobile players will build trust and loyalty with their end users while protecting their brand.
This promise presents both a challenge and an opportunity to all of the mobile operators, application service providers, enterprises, social networks and other various players in the ecosystem. Let’s explore three vital ways to keep mobile promises today and well into the future.
–Ensuring always-on connections at home and around the globe: There is perhaps no other time that a subscriber relies on the mobile promise more than when traveling, as a mobile device often serves as the user’s date book, notepad, map, and sole connection to business contacts and loved ones back home.
Regardless of who owns the visited network that is delivering the service, the roamer counts on its home provider to fulfill the promise of mobility made at the start of the user’s service agreement both at home and anywhere the user travels. Consequently, it is paramount for operators to have a 360-degree view of the customer experience in real time – both at home and while on visited networks – to ensure this promise is always fulfilled. To achieve the expectation, operators are turning to real-time intelligence solutions that leverage existing data exchanged between roaming partners to proactively identify and resolve issues before subscriber experiences are impacted and promises are broken.
–Delivering on increasingly complex demands with Wi-Fi: Whether a subscriber is at home or halfway around the globe, the promise that operators are expected to fulfill has grown exponentially more complex alongside skyrocketing demands for increasingly capable devices, advanced services and the bandwidth to support it all. To meet these expectations, Wi-Fi offload and roaming solutions have emerged as critical tools that help increase speed and reach for advanced data services.
Simply enabling Wi-Fi capabilities for subscribers is not enough. Operators must take steps to ensure an end user’s Wi-Fi experience matches the quality and ease of a traditional cellular network, and doing so requires service providers to build business and technical relationships with Wi-Fi providers to ensure behind-the-scenes complexity does not adversely impact quality of experience.
Beyond increasing speed and bandwidth to support data use, operators also are implementing solutions that use available Wi-Fi to boost voice-call quality and messaging coverage, particularly in indoor areas that can be difficult for networks in high frequencies to penetrate. This helps to ensure promises of crystal-clear voice calls and instantaneous messaging sessions are not compromised with the build out of advanced networks.
–Cultivating an ecosystem that fulfills long-term promises: As the mobile ecosystem works toward an all-IP environment that will allow service providers to deliver sustainable, long-term support for high-speed mobile data service, it is critical operators continue to provide simple, ubiquitous service to their subscribers, even though network technologies will be far from uniform. This means various flavors of “4G,” Wi-Fi and legacy networks all must interoperate together in a way that is seamless for the end user.
The key to enabling this ubiquity lies in the IP packet exchange (IPX) network, which serves as the bridge that allows these disparate technologies to connect to each other and ultimately deliver a seamless experience to the end user. IPX brings a host of other benefits as well, including improved insight into customer activity data that helps operators continue to tailor services to better meet the needs of customers.
And it’s not just operators that should consider IPX as part of their promise-fulfilling regimen. As application service providers, social networks, enterprises and the like all increasingly connect with users via mobile devices, they too are responsible for upholding the promise of mobility. For these types of mobile players, an IPX network offers a direct, high-quality, private connection to the operators responsible for delivering their services to end users – a much more robust and secure alternative to the public Internet that ultimately provides the highest level of control over content quality.
Delivering on the promise of mobility is not the responsibility of any one entity, and it cannot be achieved with a single solution. Rather, ensuring a simple, interoperable connection for end users is an ongoing mission, and it’s one that has never been more important. It will take all of us, working together as an industry, to ensure the promise remains intact moving forward.
Jeffrey Gordon is President and CEO of Syniverse and serves as a member of both the board of directors and executive committee at CTIA. Gordon joined Syniverse in 2008 as CTO and was most recently the company’s COO. In these executive leadership positions, he was responsible for the product realization, research and development, and the company’s global technology operations on five continents. Gordon, who is the co-author of seven U.S. patents relating to systems architecture and wireless communications, earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering with honors from Purdue University and is a graduate of the IBM Systems Research Institute.
