Summary: Innovation appears to be flourishing in the delivery of mobile broadband. We saw applications that allow users to monitor and control their network usage and services, ‘dynamic pricing’, and other innovative pricing strategies at the EMEA Executive Brainstorm. Despite growing enthusiasm for LTE, delegates considered offloading traffic and network sharing at least as important commercial strategies for managing costs.

Members of the Telco 2.0 Subscrioption Service and Future Networks Stream can download a more comprehensive version of this report in PDF format here. Please email or call +44 (0) 207 247 5003 to contact Telco 2.0 or STL Partners for more details.

To share this article easily, please click:

Introduction

STL Partners’ New Digital Economics Executive Brainstorm & Developer Forum EMEA took place from 11-13 May in London. The event brought together 250 execs from across the telecoms, media and technology sectors to take part in 6 co-located interactive events: the Telco 2.0, Digital Entertainment 2.0, Mobile Apps 2.0, M2M 2.0 and Personal Data 2.0 Executive Brainstorms, and an evening AppCircus developer forum.

Building on output from the last Telco 2.0 events and new analysis from the Telco 2.0 Initiative – including the new strategy report ‘The Roadmap to New Telco 2.0 Business Models’ - the Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm explored latest thinking and practice in growing the value of telecoms in the evolving digital economy.

This document gives an overview of the output from the Mobile Broadband Economics session of the  Telco 2.0 stream.

Putting users in control

A key theme of the presentations in this session was putting users in more control of their mobile broadband service, by helping them to both understand what data they have used in an interactive environment, and giving them the option to choose to buy additional data capabilities on-demand when they need and can use it.

Delegates perceptions that key obstacles to building revenue were internal industry issues, and key cost issues involve better collaboration rather than technology (specifically, LTE) were both refreshing and surprising.

Ericsson presented a mobile Broadband Data ‘Fuel gauge’ app to show how users could be better informed of their usage and be interactively offered pricing and service offers.

Figure 1 – Ericsson’s Mobile Broadband ‘Fuel Gauge’

Source: Ericsson, 13th Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm, London, May 2011

Deutsche Telekom showed its new ‘self-care’ customer app, complete with WiFi finder, Facebook integration, and ad-funding options, and how they are changing from a focus on complex tariffs to essentially Small/Medium/Large options, with tiers of speed, caps, WiFi access, and varying levels of added-on bundled services.

While we admired the apparent simplicity of the UI design of many of the elements of the services shown, we retain doubts on the proposed use of RCS and various other operator-only “enablers”, and will be further examining the pros and cons of RCS in future analysis.

New pricing approaches

In addition to Ericsson’s concept of dynamic pricing, making offers to customers at times of most need and suitability, Openwave showed numerous innovative new approaches to charging by application, time/day, user group and event (e.g. ‘Movie Pass’), segmentation of plans by user type, and how to use data plan sales to sell other services.

Figure 2 – Innovative Mobile Broadband Offers

No single ‘Killer’ obstacle to growth – but lots of challenges

Delegates voted on the obstacles to mobile broadband revenues and the impact of various measures on the control of costs.

Figure 3 – Obstacles to growing Mobile Broadband Revenues

Source: Delegate Vote, 13th Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm, London, May 2011

Our take on these results is that:

• Overall, there appears to be no single ‘killer obstacle’ to growth;
• Net Neutrality is increasingly seen as a lesser issue in EMEA, certainly than in the US;
• Whilst securing the largest number of ’major issue’ votes, we are not certain that all delegates fully know the views, needs, expectations and knowledge of upstream customers, and although their expectations are seen as an issue, it does not particularly appear more challenging than organisational or technical ones;
• Manageable technical and organisational issues (e.g. integration, organisational complexity) appear a bigger obstacle than unmanageable ones (e.g. inability to control devices), although;
• Implementation issues vary by operator, as can be seen by the relatively large proportions who either do not see integration as an issue at all or see it as a major issue.

Managing Costs: Network Sharing, Offloads as important as LTE 

Figure 4 – Impact of Mobile Broadband Cost Reduction Strategies

Our take on these results is that the approaches fall into three groups:

• Strategic, long-term solutions including network sharing, LTE and offloading;
• Strategies with a potentially important but more moderate impact including pricing, network outsourcing, and video traffic optimisation;
• And lower impact initiatives such as refreshing the 3G network.

It is interesting that network sharing deals were seen as a more strategic solution to long term cost issues than migration to LTE, although there is logic to this at the current stage of market development with the capital investments and longer time required to build out LTE networks. Similarly, data offload is currently an important cost management strategy.

We found it particularly interesting that network sharing (collaboration) deals are seen as significantly more effective than network outsourcing deals, and will be exploring this further in future analysis.

Next Steps

• Further research and analysis in this area, including a report on the pros and cons of ‘Under the Floor’ (outsourced network) strategies.
• More detailed Mobile Broadband sessions at upcoming Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorms.