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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

An Intelligent Approach to Monetizing Mobile Broadband

Joanne Steinberg
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Joanne Steinberg
According to Google estimates in March this year, more than 40 million users in India access the Internet through their mobile phones. The company is also predicting that this number will increase to 300 million people accessing the mobile Internet by 2015. Further, Cisco has forecasted that mobile data traffic in India will increase by more than 100 times by 2015, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 158 percent.

In India and beyond, new smartphones, tablets and machine-to-machine devices are allowing people to engage with social networks, conduct business and manage their day-to-day activities on the move. This new and interactive mobile experience is bringing about a revolution in mobile broadband service models as providers experiment with innovative ways to monetize their offerings, attract and retain customers, and efficiently manage network resources.

Four trends are driving new service models: personalization, simplicity, open ecosystems, and casual usage. The success of these models depends on a deep understanding of subscribers, service focused on customers rather than devices and the ability to personalize and add value to over-the-top (OTT) applications. Gaining this level of insight requires service providers to make a fundamental shift from being “network providers” to “service and content enablers.” Personalized Tiered Services Tiered services enable providers to deliver plans that link customers’ usage and preferences with what they pay. Tiers also provide more transparency into service usage and cost, creating opportunities to increase revenues as usage increases. By combining network and subscriber intelligence with sophisticated policy management tools, operators can meet the requirements of different customer and market segments with a variety of personalized service tiers that include:

• Bandwidth tiers based on the volume of data a customer uses. One example is charging $15 for 200MB and $25 for 2GB. When the quota is reached, operators can offer subscribers a temporary bandwidth boost or a promotional offer for the next tier up.

• Application-based tiers where customers pay based on application use, such as ten videos and 20 hours of gaming services per month combined with unlimited social networking. This approach reflects how customers use their phones, and operators can zero-rate applications to allow for unlimited usage. • Speed-based tiers are based on average speeds, such as $60 for 5 GB at 1.4 Mbps. Service providers can also up-sell a speed boost for limited periods of time to increase loyalty. Speed-based tiers also make cheaper plans accessible to more customers. As an example, operators can offer a prepaid plan with a low connection speed for customers on a limited budget, or a plan for the casual user who wants occasional high-speed access.


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