[Analysys Mason]: Fixed Broadband Consumers Buy on Price; VAS Increases ARPU

A new report by Aris Xylouris, Research Analyst, and Martin Scott [pictured], Practice Head, Consumer Services Research, Analysys Mason analyzes the ".. approaches that fixed operators are taking to promote superfast broadband in their respective markets".

According to the report "Consumers are reluctant to pay a premium for faster speeds [see chart below]. This, combined with the lack of clear applications for high bandwidth services for many users, diminishes potential consumer interest in superfast broadband

Consumers’ expectations of the quality of experience tend to increase along with advertised speeds, which can lead to dissatisfaction with the service for users on top-level speeds."

Criteria consumers intend to use when selecting their next fixed broadband service, by age range

"Operators should supplement superfast broadband offers with value-added services (VAS). They can charge more for such bundles, and this can increase ARPU. Services that benefit from higher access speeds – such as multi-screen TV and video-on-demand (VoD) services – are the best candidates. Services such as these will enable operators to compete with over-the-top (OTT) players, and monetise customers’ online media usage more effectively".

Percentage of tariffs that include value-added services,
 by download speed and service type, Europe, 4Q 2014

See "Multi-play pricing benchmark 4Q 2014: superfast broadband pricing and marketing strategies" - here.

[Infonetics]: "Despite the rise of mobile data, blended ARPU continues to fall"

A recent report by Stéphane Téral, principal analyst for mobile infrastructure and carrier economics, Infonetics Research (the first after being acquired by IHS - here - Congratulations to J'Amy, Shira and the team!) finds that:

• "Worldwide mobile service revenue barely budged in the first half of 2014 (1H14), up just 0.5% from the same period a year ago, to $385.5 billion .. For the first time, voice usage slightly slowed, dragged by China where over-the-top (OTT) alternatives took their share, and mobile broadband overtook SMS as the largest revenue generator of mobile data. 

• Mobile broadband revenue rose 26% in 1H14 from 1H13 and continued to drive overall mobile services market growth .. Despite the rise of mobile data, blended ARPU continues to fall, but at a much slower pace in every region, including developing Asia Pacific"  

See "Mobile broadband overtakes SMS as largest generator of mobile data revenue" - here.

[ABI]: 2B LTE (750M on LTE-Advanced) Subscribers by 2019; Boosts ARPU

 
A new report by Marina Lu [pictured], research associate, ABI Research finds that "Worldwide LTE-related subscriptions reached 229.7 million in 2013, and will continually grow at a CAGR of 43.6% between 2013 and 2019, to exceed 2 billion. .. Among the LTE subscription growth, Asia-Pacific contributes the most with a 49% market share. The second greatest contributor is North America with an 18% share .. The large population base in Asia combined with rapid LTE network deployment and cost-competitive smartphones has accelerated the remarkable subscriber adoption.”

.. LTE-Advanced subscribers will grow to 750 million in 2019 accounting for 37.3% of overall LTE subscribers. North America will be the most aggressive LTE-Advanced market, followed by Asia-Pacific and Western Europe. Remarkably, the South Korean Operators, SK Telecom and LG U+, commercially launched LTE-Advanced networks in June 2013 and by the end of 2013, SK Telecom gained more than 1 million LTE-Advanced subscribers, which equates to 10% of all its LTE subscribers,” adds Jake Saunders, VP and practice director.

The growth of LTE subscribers has also boosted ARPU, because they are bigger spenders than their 3G and 2G counterparts by 35%". 

See "Global LTE Subscriptions to Exceed 2 Billion in 2019, Driven by LTE-Advanced" - here.

Vodafone: LTE (2M Subscribers) and Unlimited Plans Improve ARPU

Vodafone's Dec 2013 results (here and here) provide some information on data services, including the roll-out of LTE ("4G") and RED, Vodafone's unlimited plans.

"We have continued to make progress with our Vodafone 2015 strategy. 9.8 million customers are now on Vodafone Red plans, and we remain on track to meet our upgraded target of 11-12 million customers by March 2014 .. Our 4G services are now available in 13 countries and we now have around 2 million 4G Red customers in Europe. Data consumption has increased significantly, with customers using on average double the amount of a 3G plan. Group data usage grew 64% year-on-year, with Europe up 44%, and AMAP [Africa, Middle-East and Asia Pac] up 110%" .

See the slides below for the data usage growth, Application usage, ARPU etc.

Openet Helps Tier1 to Increase ARPU w/3rd Party Engagement

   

Openet announced its ".. selection by a tier one European mobile operator to enable its Dynamic Services initiative. Dynamic Services provides a solution for creating, presenting and charging for mobile services, an approach that is gaining traction with leading operators worldwide. By supplementing a base service plan with value added services chosen by the subscriber, operators implementing a Dynamic Services strategy have seen increased ARPU, profit margin growth and improved customer satisfaction"

"Key to a Dynamic Services strategy is enabling third party engagement with the Policy and Charging Control infrastructure. Openet’s Interaction Gateway delivers this engagement to subscribers, who can view and purchase services, and to content providers, with controlled access to Policy and Charging functions" -

See also "Openet Extends Policy Enforcement to the Device" - here.

See "Tier One Operator Selects Openet for Dynamic Services Strategy" - here.

[Guest Post]:Usage-Based Service Management for Fixed-Line Broadband

By Stephen Collins*, VP of Product Marketing and Business Development, Active Broadband Networks

Fixed-line broadband providers need to constantly invest in increased network capacity in order to keep pace with unrelenting growth in subscriber Internet usage, driven largely by bandwidth-intensive consumption of rich media content such as OTT video. Trouble is, while per-subscriber usage continues to increase, ARPU has remained flat, resulting in margins getting squeezed because there’s no incremental revenue growth to offset the capital expenditures in expanded capacity required to ensure satisfactory quality of experience for subscribers.

  

Network operators have two ways to overcome this challenge. They can adopt a usage-based pricing model that generates additional revenue, especially from the subscribers who consistently consume the most bandwidth. While this is certainly an important aspect of addressing the problem, it’s even more critical that operators have the ability to manage subscriber demand in order to alleviate congestion during periods of peak traffic load – typically the evening hours. Without this ability, the network has to be engineered for peak demand – a costly proposition that results in operators over-investing in network capacity. 

   

The real key to solving the problem is harnessing subscriber usage and network utilization data. First, operators need to gain visibility into subscriber behavior and network performance so they can analyze demand for network capacity management and planning. They can invest capital more efficiently by knowing exactly where capacity needs to be expanded. Second, by leveraging new streaming data collection protocols and a high-performance data mediation and storage management system architecture, operators can use this same data for near real-time service and traffic management applications. 

  

High-Performance Data Mediation

  

The network elements already deployed in the existing broadband network infrastructure are the source of a wealth of subscriber usage and network telemetry data that can be retrieved using highly efficient streaming data collection protocols such as IP Detail Record (IPDR), RADIUS and IPFIX/NetFlow. When enabled in a network element, these protocols operate by periodically taking a snapshot of a set of statistics and parameters and packaging the values into a single record that is sent to a centralized collector. If the collection interval is set short enough – 10 to 15 minutes – then it is possible to use the data collected for near real-time service and traffic management applications. 

  

However, doing this effectively in a large network with hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers requires a service management system capable of collecting, processing and storing a large number of stream data records within each specified collection interval. This involves decoding protocol records and performing a series of checks and cross-checks to ensure the integrity of the data. It also involves generating mediated subscriber usage records that are time normalized relative to a fixed reference for the service management system. These mediated records then need to be stored in an in-memory cache for rapid access by service and traffic management applications as well as written to disk for archival storage and historical trend analysis. The massive volume of usage data collected requires Big Data storage technology in order to meet the stringent performance and scalability requirements.

  

Applying Usage Data for Policy-Based Traffic Management

  

Mediated subscriber usage data can serve as the foundation for service and traffic management applications that measure and monitor subscriber usage as well as network utilization and apply policies to network elements to actively manage subscriber traffic in near real-time. Network operators can choose to implement policy-based proactive and reactive traffic management schemes to avoid network congestion and alleviate it when it occurs, improving overall utilization while ensuring subscriber quality of experience. 

  

Proactive traffic management ensures that usage conforms to a subscriber's service tier by continuously monitoring a subscriber's usage over a sliding time window and triggering the application of policies to manage a subscriber's service when specific usage thresholds defined in the subscriber’s service profile are exceeded. This approach simplifies network capacity management by ensuring subscriber usage will conform to a set of service tiers that can be modeled with the network engineered accordingly. 

  

However, even a well-engineered network with all subscriber traffic in conformance can experience congestion during peak busy hours, resulting in the need for reactive traffic management. This approach detects congestion by continuously monitoring network utilization and automatically taking action to manage subscriber traffic when a specified utilization threshold is exceeded. A reasonable and fair way to alleviate congestion is to identify the subscribers with the most usage during the recent time window and apply policies to manage their traffic. Managing the traffic of just the top subscribers will free up bandwidth for the rest of the subscribers. 

  

The Business Value of Usage-Based Broadband Service Management

  

Broadband providers can realize significant business value by leveraging subscriber usage data for broadband service management. Usage data is critical for network capacity management, allowing operators to analyze network utilization for more efficient capital expenditures when expanding capacity. More importantly, it can serve as the foundation for policy-based service and traffic management applications that ensure more efficient network utilization while improving subscriber quality of experience, enabling network operators to better amortize investments in network capacity.

_______

*Stephen Collins is the vice president of product marketing and business development at Active Broadband Networks. Prior to joining Active Broadband, Stephen served as vice president of product marketing at Acme Packet. Earlier in his career, Stephen held executive marketing and business development positions at Tatara Systems, ThinkEngine Networks, Sonus Networks, and Spring Tide Networks (acquired by Lucent Technologies), which he co-founded. He was a founding engineer at Wellfleet Communications and began his career as a member of technical staff at AT&T Bell Labs. 

Monday's Guest Post: The Business Value of Usage-Based Broadband Service Management

A new guest post will be published on Monday. In his article, "Usage-Based Service Management for Fixed-Line Broadband" my 24th guest, Stephen Collins, will discuss how fixed-line operators can keep pace with unrelenting growth in subscriber Internet usage, driven largely by bandwidth-intensive consumption of rich media content such as OTT video.

".. Trouble is, while per-subscriber usage continues to increase, ARPU has remained flat, resulting in margins getting squeezed because there’s no incremental revenue growth to offset the capital expenditures in expanded capacity required to ensure satisfactory quality of experience for subscribers" says Stephen.

Stay tuned!

Guest posts are welcomed! Please email me for guidelines.

Report: Data Caps Raise ISPs Profit Margins

  
Verizon's CFO already said, in public, that shared (and limited) data plans are "an optimal way for us to monetize increasing data usage" (here). A new report by New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute [OTI] agrees.

The report, by Hibah Hussain (pictured), Danielle Kehl, Benjamin Lennett and Patrick Lucey finds that ".. increasingly costly and restrictive data caps are serving little purpose other than to raise the already high profit margins of broadband providers .. Internet service providers argue data caps are necessary to manage growing traffic and maintain quality of service on their networks .. instead, they are the product of an uncompetitive broadband marketplace where providers use data restrictions to increase revenues and protect legacy services such as cable television from online competition".

"The technical rational for imposing monthly limits on all subscribers makes little sense when network congestion tends to occur at limited times of the day and in certain locations. In addition, maintaining quality of service does not require Internet service providers to charge users exorbitant overage fees rather than pursuing less costly and punitive measures, particularly as the costs for operating broadband networks continues to decline"

"In July 2011, Verizon Wireless announced that it would be introducing a tiered pricing system for mobile users that included data caps .. Since then, both Verizon and AT&T have reconfigured their data plans, simultaneously raising prices and data caps so that while users may be paying less per MB today than a year ago, they have to choose between a more expensive basic plan and incrementally higher tiers as well .. Both companies have also introduced family share plans for data—similar to plans that allow families to share minutes and text messages—in which users share a single data cap,but pay a fee for each mobile device connected to the plan. The results of this policy shift have been clear—the average revenue per user (ARPU) from monthly subscription wireless data plans has steadily increased since 2009, climbing at a higher rate than the ARPU for other metrics such as retail service and other postpaid fees. And the trend is likely to only increase as AT&T and Verizon push their new shared data plans, which offer additional opportunities to boost data ARPU".

 

See "NEW REPORT: Capping the Nation's Broadband Future" - here.

[Sharma]: US Wireless Signaling Traffic Increased 3X

Some highlights from Chetan Sharma's report on the US wireless for Q3, 2012 [see below]:

• The US mobile data market grew 3% Q/Q and 17% Y/Y to reach $19.9B in Q3 2012
   
• Most western markets have seen the net revenue in the messaging segment decline. The US market has resisted the decline thus far. In Q3 2012, for the first time, there was a decline in both the total number of messages as well as the total messaging revenue in the market.
   
• New types of plans [shared data] also evolved the decades-old operator metric of ARPU to ARPA (Average Revenue Per Account) given that we are seeing a strong influx of multiple devices per individual/household
   
• The overall data consumption in the US market in 2012 is expected to exceed 2000 Petabytes or 2 Exabytes. The smartphone data consumption at some operators is averaging close to 900 MB/mo. Some devices are averaging close to 2 GB/mo. As we move into 1GB range along with the family data plans kicking in, you can expect the data tiers to get bigger both in GBs and dollar amount.
   
• Mobile data traffic growth is likely to slow down to roughly 80% after doubling for the last five years. Voice traffic will dip below 10% of the overall traffic in 2012.
   
• The Signaling traffic has increased 3x.

See "Us wireless market_q3_2012_update_nov_2012_chetan_sharma_consulting" - here

Swisscom Shows the Unlimited Business-Case

While US operators eliminate unlimited plans (usually in favor of Shared Data Plans), Swisscom finds the unlimited ("infinity") strategy promising, expects "Revenues from products charged on basis of usage will ultimately disappear" and "positive ARPU development from 2013 through “wronggraders” and upselling to higher speed plans for existing customers". Competitive OTT services play a major role in this strategy.

See the following slides from Swisscom's recent Investor & Analyst presentation (Q3, 2012):

See "Unlimited” - here.

Verizon: Why Shared Data Plans are Good for Our Business

During its Q2 results call, Fran Shammo (pictured), Verizon's CFO explained why shared data plans (see "Verizon Wireless Adds Shared Data Plans (1-10GB)" - here) are good (for Verizon):

"Our Share Everything plans, which became available on June 28, represent a new and innovative pricing framework, providing a unique customer value proposition and at the same time creating an optimal way for us to monetize increasing data usage. The strategic thrust of these plans is to encourage device adoption and stimulate usage. Our plans are designed to make the decision to upgrade to a smartphone or add a tablet much easier. By allowing up to 10 devices to share data, these plans also provide for the creation and adoption of all kinds of new connected devices".
  

"Early feedback has been great, and our customer adoption is tracking with our expectations. We are seeing a wide variety of customers and family share accounts opting into Share Everything, including existing smartphone customers with unlimited data plans".

Later, answering a question on whether "we should be looking for some ARPU headwind in the third quarter", Mr. Shammo added: 

"It is very preliminary. We just launched this on June 28, so we just started in on this. I think some of the positive factors that we are seeing is that obviously your early adopters are always your optimizers. But to be honest, based on where we are at right now, we are actually tracking ahead of where we thought we would be, and we don't see any ARPU impact in the third quarter or fourth quarter. I think our trend will continue that we have established here in the first and second quarter".

"And the benefit, though, that we do see is that we are seeing some 3G Unlimited customers move into our 4G shared data plan product, and that is excellent for us from a cash flow position on capital efficiency and cost reduction metrics. So there is some interesting things there. And then again, the other thing on ARPU here is as Internet device ARPU continues to improve, that gives us better opportunity to accelerate our overall ARPU growth".

See "EDITED TRANSCRIPT - VZ - Q2 2012 Verizon Earnings Conference Call" - here.

CommProve: The Business Model Behind Cell Awareness

  

CommProve published some numbers, "that have been pulled together based on CommProve real-life deployments", arguing that "..real-time cell-awareness is the key to mobile network operators simultaneously increasing ARPU whilst preventing OTT revenue erosion. Combined with policy management, real-time cell awareness provides mobile operators with the opportunity to customize subscriber quality of experience with – for example – speed boosts and priority network use on a per subscriber or application basis".

See "CommProve Adds Cell, Location and Mobility Intelligence to Policy Management" - here.

"Real-time cell awareness enables real-time customization of the subscriber experience. For the first time effective policy control can be implemented and managed minute-by-minute at the subscriber level .. By including real-time cell awareness operators can: Make CapEx savings and Avoid revenue leakage from subscribers not being able to access resources"

Example Use Case:	(Euro)
Monthly revenue from 1 BTS with congestion	€55,500
Monthly revenue from 1 BTS without congestion	€57,200
Number of BTSs full coverage	120,000
Estimated number of congested BTSs	8,400
Estimated number of congested hours (in a month)	75
Revenue loss saving per month	€1,487,500

See "Real-time cell awareness key to sweating mobile network assets" - here.

VAS Announcements: Kineto's VoIP Application for MNOs

My last one on VoIP/IM OTT for the day ,..

After seeing the stats from Allot (here), and the recommendations from Ovum and Informa (here), there is also a product that may help MNOs salvage their voice revenues.

Kineto Wireless announced ".. Smart VoIP, the first VoIP application specifically developed to enable mobile operators to leverage their existing network infrastructure to offer a competitive over-the-top (OTT) voice service .. supports a range of standard mobile telephony capabilities and is designed to run on major mobile operating systems, including iPhone®, Android® and Windows Mobile®. The application can be branded by mobile operators and downloaded to subscribers through standard application stores .. Kineto’s Smart VoIP application ..Works over any network .. Ties to main voice service .. [and] Leverages existing core network".

See "Kineto Announces New over-the-top VoIP Application Built for Mobile Operators" - here.

[Infonetics] Mobile VoIP ARPU was $13 in 2011

 

Stéphane Téral (pictured), Principal Analyst, Infonetics Research claims that "With the increased adoption of smartphones and mobile broadband combined with regulatory regimes that have forbidden mobile operators from blocking mobile VoIP (mVoIP) applications, the market is primed for continued adoption of OTT services .. Meanwhile, with all the pain they are inflicting on mobile operators, OTT numbers are far from being impressive: we counted a total of 91 million active users in 2011, up from 47 million a year earlier, generating revenues in the range of $1.2 billion .. This pales when compared to a total of more than 5.6 billion mobile subscribers worldwide delivering more than $460 billion worth of voice revenues". 

"Frontrunner Skype, now part of Microsoft, dominates the worldwide mVoIP services market. More importantly, because they offer their services for free, there is little room for native VoIP-based services".  

See  also "[TeleGeography] Skype Grew by 48% in 2011 - Generating 25% of all International Minutes" - here. 

See "Opinion: Voice still has a voice – you just can’t hear it!" - here.

 

Dean Bubley: "application-based charging for mobile data won't work"

 

While my blog often advocates DPI based policy management as a way to increase ARPU and I think it is fair to show other opinions, such the one [also often] expressed by Dean Bubley (pictured), founder of Disruptive Analysis.

In a his recent blog post, following the Broadband Traffic Management Congress held last week, Dean adds another reason as for why he doesn't believe in such business model - although " lots of DPI and PCRF vendors have spent a lot of money on custom silicon and software to crunch through "traffic" and have promoted standards like 3GPP's new "Traffic Detection Function", and are now determined to justify the hype".

Dean goes back to the old issue of "cat-and-mouse game" between the application/content creators and the DPI systems trying to identify the traffic, as well as the difficulty in defining the boundaries of each application or service. This was indeed the main challenge when DPI systems when their main use was to limit P2P and VoIP traffic, but then the time it took the vendors to support new or updated protocols was not critical.

When traffic classification is attached to revenues - the time required to make the necessary changes (see "The Challenges of Maintaining a Current DPI "Signatures File" - here and "Rogers [Canada] Admits its P2P Traffic Management Impacts Interactive Gaming" - here and here) becomes very critical. Also, "zero-rating" plans maybe charged (or counted towards volume-caps) breaching the service plans terms.

These are valid arguments, as long as the ISP and the content providers are acting as "enemies" - and the ISP tries to monetize popular content. However, a partnership between the two may create a win-win situation, justified by new revenues to the OTT, derived from improved service. See for example - "Yankee Group: MNOs Should Give Customers Choices for VoIP" - here or even Dean's comment to my previous post "DT Believes in "Two-Sided" Business Model - OTT to Pay for QoS" - here.

Nevertheless, such model does not follow the very basic logic that is behind Net Neutrality, as it provides an unfair advantage to the large content owners and may simply kill the ability of new startups to reach the masses (see recent EU decision - here).

See "Another reason why application-based charging for mobile data won't work" - here.

3UK - Network Built and Used for Data; Revenues Come from Voice

   

Phil Sheppard (pictured), Director of Network Strategy at Three UK, updates in carrier's blog that "97% of all the traffic that now travels through our network is data .. since June last year and September this year (just 14 months) we’ve seen a 427% increase in data usage on Three for smartphone customers"

So, now it would be interesting to correlate these numbers with revenues or ARPU. The only information I could find is a bit old - but may be indicative. According to the Hutchinson's 2010 report, "The proportion of revenue from the higher margin non-voice services increased to 41% of ARPU compared to 36% in 2009" (here).

See "We’re built for data" - here.

AT&T to Throttle Top 5% of Unlimited Subscribers

 

While AT&T quickly moves to usage-based billing (see "AT&T: Usage-Based Pricing is a Success" - here), had "More than 15 million subscribers on tiered data plans" - here) and a nice ARPU increase in Q2 (see chart), it still sees the need for implementing a new throttling policy.

The carrier announced it will do so starting October 1, for "a very small minority of smartphone customers who are on unlimited plans - those whose extraordinary level of data usage puts them in the top 5 percent of our heaviest data users in a billing period" 

Currently AT&T's mobile broadband service plan, DataConnect, "is not an unlimited plan" and charges for overage ($10/GB or more, see chart below for 3G/4G plans - other plans exist for tablets).

"Starting October 1, smartphone customers with unlimited data plans may experience reduced speeds once their usage in a billing cycle reaches the level that puts them among the top 5 percent of heaviest data users. These customers can still use unlimited data and their speeds will be restored with the start of the next billing cycle. Before you are affected, we will provide multiple notices, including a grace period .. The amount of data usage of our top 5 percent of heaviest users varies from month to month, based on the usage of others and the ever-increasing demand for mobile broadband services .. Using Wi-Fi doesn't create wireless network congestion or count toward your wireless data usage".

"But even as we pursue this additional measure, it will not solve our spectrum shortage and network capacity issues. Nothing short of completing the T-Mobile merger will provide additional spectrum capacity to address these near term challenges"

See "An Update for Our Smartphone Customers With Unlimited Data Plans" - here.

See also "Sprint Will Throttle Virgin Mobile Users Exceeding 2.5GB" (also in October) - here and "Verizon's UBB Starts July 7"- here.

Mobixell Adds Monetization Opportunities: Subscriber Oriented Video Optimization and Control Features

  

Mobixell announced ".. version 5 of its converged mobile Internet solution, Seamless Access .. Seamless Access 5 is even more cost-effective than the previous release which itself achieved 80% of the “optimize-all” benefits with as little as 20% of the hardware resources compared to competing solutions".

Some of the new features, described below, bring real value to subscribers. As such they may be sold as Value-added Service/s, allowing mobile carriers to offer them for additional monthly fees, increase ARPU and the attractiveness of the service.
  

"In addition to device-aware Web and video optimization, support for new video formats including WebM/VP8 and Content Aware algorithms that analyze video scene complexity and quality, some of the new user-centric features in Mobixell Seamless Access 5 include ..  Smart Toolbar  – Mobile Operators can offer subscribers the Smart Toolbar to give them control over how they consume mobile video under changing circumstances .. Flash video support for iOS devices – transcoding of video in Adobe® Flash® format for the Apple® iOS"

Noam Green, VP Marketing for Mobixell, provided me with more details on the new Smart Toolbar and Flash support for iOS devices:

• When minimized, the Smart Toolbar is a small, non-intrusive floating icon. It is pre-integrated with Mobixell video optimization and policy management tools within the Seamless Access platform so that when it is activated it gives subscribers control over their data usage. The Smart Toolbar also helps operators to provide value added services within their subscribers’ environment with easy access to operator-managed apps, branded messaging and 3rd party advertising 

    

• There are client-based solutions. But solutions such as the SkyFire browser force subscribers to use another browser when they prefer Safari, the default choice, or other browsers that they prefer. Heavy client-based transcoding solutions such as Puffin provide only the optimization that can function within the limitations of the device. With Device-Aware video optimization and Flash transcoding sitting server-side, operators can make sure that user QoS is optimized for all users, regardless of which device or browser they use. Seamless Access Flash for iOS currently supports Flash video and soon will support animation to support Flash-based menus and applications, as well"

See "Mobile Internet Platform – Mobixell Seamless Access 5 – Puts Mobile Operators Second" - here.

Alepo Adds a Mobile App for Dynamic Bandwidth Speed Selection to its PCRF

    

Alepo has ".. unveiled the first mobile app to enable dynamic bandwidth selection by end users. Aimed at mobile operators as a value-added service, the app capitalizes on the growing demand for faster and more personalized bandwidth speeds on mobile devices while enhancing the customer experience .. Alepo's Bandwidth Selection App directly communicates in with the operator's PCRF in real-time. It is available for both Android and iPhone".

In view of the recent intentions of major providers to deploy speed based tiered services (see - AT&T, Verizon) - such management tools makes sense, and allows a more dynamic service management. Customers may change the speed based on their specific data needs and spending budget - boost it when necessary and get back to lower speed and costs at other times.

See "Alepo Introduces Mobile App for Dynamic Bandwidth Speed Selection" - here - however, I can’t locate the new app in the Apple App Store.

John Kim (picture), Alepo VP of Business Development, said: "Alepo's Bandwidth Selection App assures subscribers of more personalized services by enabling them to tailor their policy to each situation .. By monetizing the solution, mobile service providers not only increase ARPU, but are able to better balance network resources while satisfying all subscribers"

Ovum: MNOs should use Customer Data and Policy Management to Drive Profits

A new research by Clare McCarthy (picture), principal analyst for Ovum, joins many other and finds that "MNOs need to use customer data held in the business support system with network policy management and control, if they are to manage soaring traffic loads, drive profits, personalise the customer experience and increase their agility and response times ..Segmented data plans are one way of increasing revenues, and they can also help deliver a better customer experience. For example, an enterprise is more likely than a family to pay for guaranteed bandwidth, priority service availability and predefined access controls".

See "Mobile network operators need new approaches to make data profitable" - here.

"According to forecasts by Ovum, mobile broadband users are set to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 28 per cent over five years to 2015. 3G dongles and smartphones will drive demand for broadband data applications, while smartphone and tablet users will increasingly use their devices for video services"

See also - "Ovum Mobile Revenue CAGR Forecast (2009-2015): Data +11%, Voice -1.4%" - here