Telco strategies for mobile broadband

I put together six ideas for how we as operators can increase the reach we have to customers, and how we can leverage that reach to make money from it.

Service bouquets come first. We should stop selling separate services individually and think instead about a bouquet that is valuable to a customer. The tariffs already show it: an access part, the classical minutes, messages and data, and a service part alongside. Good, better, best. As you go up, the speed and the allowances rise, and so does the number of services, cloud backup and contact restore at one level, all our Wi-Fi networks included at the next, a security package above that. It creates a low entry offer that brings customers in, and a reason to upsell that secures the value over time.

Second, and we do not leverage this at all in telco, generate reach by giving services away. Put applications and services into even the lowest tariff for free, then monetise inside the service the way the app stores taught us: a phone book that resolves numbers, a voicemail that becomes visual and then speech to text, the first levels of a game, free channels alongside pay TV. Once a customer uses those services, there is every reason to upsell them into a higher access tariff too, because they need the speed and the prioritisation.

Third, we can talk to our customers far more intelligently, using what we already own. A tab inside the native marketplace, where we promote services without building anything separate. Self-care on the web and in the app. Landing pages. A roaming app that makes the offer when your plane lands. The idle screen on the devices we sell, which we pre-install and should use far more smartly. And even interactive messaging, which reaches down to feature phones with enormous reach and can hold a dialogue driven by analytics.

Fourth, standards, which is my favourite theme. Look at how many customers we have as an industry: more than five billion doing voice, nearly as many messaging, and a growing data base. Against that, the installed bases of individual internet applications are far smaller. My point is that if we get those services onto devices in a standardised, cross-operator way at the moment the customer buys the phone, the average customer has no need to download anything. Messaging is there. Voice is there. So I am very much in favour of driving RCS, and I would personally estimate the risk of failure at fifty percent or more, which may not even be politically correct to say. I think there is a huge risk we fail, and I think we have to do it as an industry, because the customer wants basic communication to work regardless of what the person at the other end installed. Video calling, file sharing and messaging in the first release.

Fifth, the two-sided model, which I call B2B2X. On the retail side we sell the traditional telco services. Underneath sit telco services such as billing, quality of service and identity management, and global services such as storage. We already wholesale the classic products to other operators. The opportunity is to standardise the telco services so we can expose them to IP players and to the open developer community, which makes the reach on the other side of the model very much larger.

Sixth, machine-to-machine, where the scale of connecting machines rather than people is obvious. The trick is not to look only at the access part and work through the verticals, but to move up the value chain and put out a solution that combines access, service and solution together. That is where the value is, and telcos are only starting to realise it.