Keeping on top of market trends for mobile operators is just something that comes naturally when you provide network management solutions for telecoms providers. We engage with our customers to address industry-wide challenges daily – and along the way we keep up on market research to ensure we understand not only market trends, but also the issues likely to affect Telcos in the future.
Here are our top three mobile operator market trends – looking at what’s in store for services.
Telecommunications Consumer Trends: New Services
While the traditional mobile and broadband services still account for most of telecoms operators’ revenue, these markets are not showing much growth in mature markets such as Europe and North America. Here, the significant growth is in new services such as IPTV, online gaming, cloud services, and new markets such as wearable technology.
Services are consumed on increasingly disparate devices, through mobile radio networks, WiFi and broadband. Services are also more interactive, in real-time; with online gaming, chat, VoIP, social networks. As quickly as customers can consume data, more data is produced.
However, in emerging markets such as Asia and South America, we see an uptake in data services thanks to better aligned pricing of smartphones.
Telecommunications Industry Trends: New Products, Services & Markets
For the last few years, operators have been talking about developing new sources of revenue as the costs of voice and data services are being constantly squeezed through competition. This driver, combined with technological advances, has led to new products, services and markets, as well as innovative approaches for operational efficiency.
These can be summarised as:
• M2M and cloud based services
• Analytics for marketing and monetisation of consumer data
• Shared networks
• Operational efficiency (using SON for example)
• Expansion into broadband services to complement existing services and generate new revenue
• Technology migration – a trend led by India, Middle East, Nordics, UK and USA
• Adoption of data based services consumption in emerging economies
Service Assurance Trends: Customer Experience
Service assurance investments are currently focused on improving customer experience. Mobile and broadband suppliers are putting greater emphasis on solutions supporting customer experience than ever before – and delivering simplification through consolidation of network operations.
The transition to service operations centres is creating a demand for unified service assurance solutions that combine performance, fault and service management functions.
A typical operational support system (OSS) transformation includes:
• Use of real-time network monitoring and analytics to improve the customer experience
• Network analytics and predictive analytics to improve network planning and optimisation
• Targeted marketing campaigns, using network data, to understand usage behaviour and increase ARPU
• Reduction of OPEX through consolidation of systems, e.g:
o Unified assurance solutions across operational domains
o Multi-tenancy umbrella OSS solutions
The consolidation of OSS solutions for performance management, service monitoring and resources fault management is motivated by two goals:
• Simplification of portfolio and reduction of OPEX
• Cross-domain correlation of data
Both goals achieve quantifiable benefits. For example, the real-time correlation of a customer session and its related service performance issues, such as contention, is valuable in managing the customer experience – and will reduce churn.
Another example is the instant identification of performance KPI degradation, and its relation to a specific root cause resource issue in the network. This allows operators to prioritise issues and reduce the time taken to repair them.
Such use cases can be further enhanced when combined with automation. Today, we are able to analyse in real-time vast amounts of heterogeneous data from the network: probes, call tracing, weather feeds etc, and we can automatically deduce remedial actions, such as interfacing with a SON.
To drive network and services planning, optimisation, and reduction in the time to market, operators are also turning to predictive analytics; applied to network data and customer usage, which is all key in maintaining a competitive edge.
Do you have a service assurance market industry trend you’d like to hear more about on our blog? Get in touch today.