M for Mobile. M for Money. M for Mobile Money.

This artice in ET may seem to be aggrandizing the scope for mobile payments. But I think the writer Mayur Shetty is on solid ground when seeing possibilities for some sort of convergence between banks and mobile operators. Japan and Slovenia are two countries I know where such convergence experiments are already being conducted. More on that later.

Key points from the article:

• It is not rival financial service companies but the telecom operators who might well emerge as the biggest challengers to the monopoly that banks have had over the industry of money.
• The total money mobilised by telecom companies as advance payment from pre-paid users for talktime works out to Rs 4,459 crore.
• The advanced billing systems used by telcos allow them to record the smallest transaction in a cost effective manner, making it suitable for micro-payments.
• Total number of bank accounts in the country, stands at 334 million savings and current accounts.
• “Phone banking” is currently seen as a value added service provided by banks that allows you to operate your bank account over the phone.
• Mobile phone might well emerge as one the major payment channels.
• Banks and telcos can collaborate to offer the latest in banking services to the rural areas.
• Banks can use mobile service providers for delivery of microfinance.
• Tying up with banks can help telcos to reduce non-performing assets and collect payments.

10:14:36 PM    comment   

If there’s one thing telcos are indisputably king-of-the-hill at doing, it’s value-based pricing and tariff obfuscation. Even the airlines with their sophisticated yield management systems and variable pricing don’t come close. The airlines’ forte is price discrimination, which is selling basically the same thing to different people at different prices based on willingness to pay. Airline prices are easy to compare, and the product is fairly homogeneous — we fly you from A to B.

Telco bundles are deliberately fiendish to compare. The services are quite diverse (e.g. SMS, video calls, broadband, handsets and a zillion phone call rates), which gives plenty of scope for innovation in creating a unique non-comparable packaging of the offer. There’s a whole sub-industry grown up around this.

There’s just one, small, tiny problem.

We don’t believe this skill is going to be a critical factor to being successful in a Telco 2.0 world, where abundance, flat-rates and low internal costs of sales, billing and support are key themes.

Let’s make a small case study out of Vodafone UK’s current promotion. We’re picking on them, but most other operators would do just as well: only a few, like T-Mobile, 3 and Sprint have made any serious effort at simplifying their pricing. Vodafone has a weaker position in the UK consumer market than you might expect. (Their enterprise offerings, as always, continue to sell well — these were the early adopters right back to the analogue cellular world, and Vodafone’s DNA is built around them.) They’re doing some positive things to help change this, such as family plans.

Vodafone Family. Unlimited calls between four people.

Now family plans aren’t anything new — in the US market they’ve been around for ages. Keith has done a good job of explaining how this move may strengthen Vodafone’s market position.

The problem is that Vodafone can’t seem to choose between simplicity and complexity in its pricing. A family plan is about predictable pricing and removing “metered minute anxiety” in close social groups. Let’s click through their web site to buy a service plan.

So far, so good, although these plans are not particularly competitive: the strategy is to ask for lots of money, and then sweeten the deal by offering lots of added-value extras which have low marginal cost to Vodafone but relatively high perceived user value.

Let’s select a plan:

I think you can see the difficulty. The average user has got better things to do than combinatorial optimisation problems. Choices and more choices — and lots of research to do. The consumer gets increasingly worried about making the “wrong” choice. “Hahaha — you fell for that Stop The Clock trick mum. Don’t you know most mobile calls are under a minute, and that the long ones are mostly off-peak minutes anyway?”

Finally, the family plan promotion re-surfaces. If it’s what you were looking for at the outset, you’ve had a long wait. What Vodafone need to concentrate on is simply closing the deal. They assume that they’re more special than they really are, and that consumers will be patient enough to wade through their marketing maze.

Contrast this with consumer-friendly Virgin Mobile’s proposition:

That’s it. One choice: how much do you want to spend? Now, Virgin Mobile have their own execution and strategic woes, but as a consumer marketing operation, it’s hard to beat.

Pip Coburn’s recent book The Change Function talks about perceived pain of adoption in how new technologies and products are adopted. What Vodafone are doing is increasing the non-money search and transaction costs for users. They’re also infecting the rest of their brand proposition with a taint of complexity. It might not seem like a big deal, but Vodafone have consistently underperformed in the consumer market, despite their scale of operation and favourable on-net economics.

Apple’s iPod took out the complexity of ripping, filing and filling — and presented a stripped-bare user interface. The perceived pain was low. (It was also sold on the benefits of songs and style, not acronyms and features.) Yet the problem persists in the entertainment world, where DRM encumbers every purchase decision with additional implicit costs. More acquisition pain, lower sales.

The airlines have also followed the same path, with Southwest and Easyjet forcing simplified pricing on the “majors”. Consumers don’t want to be bamboozled, and fear being ripped off.

The alternative to value pricing is abundance pricing. We’ll give you lots of it — lots and lots. It need not be cheap, but it will be predictable and simple, and you won’t be faced with choices, decisions and buyer’s regret at every turn. You then tier your market based on quality. In the case of telephony, you’d offer “business” quality services like wideband audio and enhanced voicemail to separate out the price-sensitive customers from the rest that way instead. Vodafone’s chief, Arun Sarin, recently said that flat-rate was the future. Maybe it’s time for the marketing to catch up with the leadership intention?

We’ll be looking more into the degeneration of pricing as a marketing tool in our forthcoming report on the future of the voice and messaging business.

9:30:14 PM    comment   

In conversation with an executive from a major Internet company the other evening, I came across an interesting thought. His hypothesis was that telcos don’t understand the resentment and anger that users have against the operators. Whilst the operators will attempt to match the softphone, IM and real-time communications features of the Internet players, their brands will get in the way of adoption. He isn’t saying telco brands are poison: just that they don’t stand for what the operators think they mean. Both sides will only be successful in new revenue-generating services deployment if they work together.

So what do telco brands really stand for? And what (if anything) needs to change in the horizontalised Telco 2.0 world? We’ve had out thinking caps on here, and below is our first effort at an answer. We’d love to get your feedback on this thorny question.

Global brand minnows, local brand giants

A Business Week article earlier this year pondered the same question: “Note to Telecoms: Rebrand or Die”. They say that “there were no telecom carriers in Interbrand’s most recent Top 100 Global Brands Scorecard.” For an industry of this size, and it’s awesome spending on customer acquisition and promotion, that’s not a good thing to hear. However, the way the study is structured almost guarantees the exclusion of network operator brands. One of the listing criteria is “must have at least one-third of revenues outside of their country of origin.” The regulatory landscape and interconnected nature of the core products means there are no truly global telecom operator brands (although the handset and network folk do quite well).

Looking at the details of the study, Interbrand list six key factors in their brand assessment. How do telcos fare?

• Recognition. Has the public heard of it, and does it mean anything to people?

Score: A+. I’d expect most people in most countries could tell you the names of all the leading fixed and mobile operators. They also have a very clear idea over what they do and the relative positioning of each major brand.

• Consistency. Does it mean the same thing everywhere, even though the product may be tailored to local tastes?

Score: B+. Those cross-border operators that do exist are often stitched-together patchworks or partial or total control, with diverse legacy customer bases, and often confusingly different approaches to the market that persist for years. Even national operators like Sprint operate through affiliate agreements that can create subtle inconsistencies and market confusion. But generally the picture’s quite healthy.

• Emotion. Does it “symbolize a promise that people believe it can deliver and one they desire to be part of.”

Score: C. Users like broadband and love mobility. But they associate most of the glory with the mobile handset, software providers and online services. Telco brands generally aren’t ones people will tattoo on their arms or see as being cool.

• Uniqueness. Does it stand out from rivals?

Score: B-. Within each market there are often distinctive “quality incumbent”, “challenger”, “innovator”, and “price leader” roles. However, brands sometimes try to be all things at once, and the rate at which users churn from one operator to another suggests they’re seen as pretty interchangeable. For a while a few like Orange and Nextel really stood for something unique, but emulation has flattened out the differences. When a premium brand exist the pre-paid market, we’ll believe something’s changed.

• Adaptability. Can it respect local needs and tastes as well as expressing global needs and aspirations?

Score: C. The US market is too homogeneous to really qualify. The multinationals like O2, Vodafone and Orange have had a pretty mixed experience in creating locally meaningful instantiations of their global brand. DoCoMo has notoriously failed to export i-mode to other markets and localise the experience on a consistent basis. We’re not convinced, but less than a “pass” grade would be mean.

• Management. Does the company leadership “champion the brand” and live its philosophy?

Score: D. Do you really think any of the telco execs really use all these advanced services? At least Steve Ballmer at Microsoft plays with his kids’ XBox, and Bill Gates knows how to use Word and Outlook. Do you get the feeling that telecom executives are passionate about communications? When was the last time a telco exec stood up and screamed how wonderful his product is and shouted down the detractors? How many telco execs blog their passion for the business? (If Motorola’s CTO can do it, so can you.)

Overall, it’s not too bad a picture. However, just like nobody cares about our exam scores when you left school once your career gets underway, these are the backwards-looking scores from the old world.

Before we start on the forwards-looking side, a few other notes about telco branding.

The technology may be amazing, but the promises have been incredible

There are a number of problems that telco brands face.

Firstly, telcos repeatedly over-promise and under-deliver. This is particularly true of mobile network quality and coverage boasts, which simply don’t seem to represent the indoors and out-of-coverage reality that users actually experience. There are plenty of other examples, with most early mobile web adverts probably the best example of confusion over truth and reality.

Secondly, telcos claim credit for parts of the value chain they didn’t create. Your world. Delivered.?. Maybe, but users aren’t fooled that it’s Google and Yahoo doing a lot of the real legwork of service creation.

Finally, telcos consistently deface their brands as suppliers you can trust through usurious or hidden charges and weasel contract terms. It’s not good to disappoint your customer once a month: that’s aversion therapy, not brand building.

Operators need to address these tactical issues as well as the overall strategic positioning.

The core products are unbranded

Telecom is also rather a strange beast. The interconnected nature of the public services of telephony and messaging create services that everyone knows and uses. However, these services remain unbranded. Phoning and texting have almost faded into the background of society, and are taken for granted. You can contrast this with, say, the banking industry which brands the interconnect with powerful VISA and Mastercard logos. Even the airline industry in the era of paper tickets made a (weak) brand promise of “ticket portability” with the IATA logo, where you could get your ticket endorsed and fly on another carrier.

There’s also no obvious answer to the problem of how to express the promise of “works well everywhere for everyone you know” compared to, say, a Skype client which “works well sometimes for a few people you know”. Remember those “QC Passed” stickers everywhere on cameras and TVs when Far East manufacturers were trying to overcome perceptions of low quality? How will operators brand “IMS powered” premium products given the lack of history in platform branding? Again, no easy answers.

In other words, there are corporate bands (e.g. Vodafone) and portal or platform brands (e.g. Live!, i-mode, PCS Vision), but few specific product brands (e.g. Nextel’s Direct Connect would be an exception) and nothing to represent the collective standardisation and interoperation promise of the telecoms industry.

The Telco 2.0 prescription (draft)

So, what do telcos need to do about their brand positioning?

Personally I subscribe to the branding is dead school of thought. Read the words carefully. Brands are not dead, but the activity of putting a false gloss on who you are and what you do just doesn’t work any more. Users are too connected to alternative sources of opinion, and each other, to be fooled like they once might have been. They simply don’t trust or believe marketing claims. Credulity is out, delivery is in.

That means you actually need to do something different or special, and not merely claim it. What you do depends on what Telco 2.0 strategy you follow. In a nutshell, it’s a combination of product differentiation, platform and/or pipe. The branding strategy will follow the Telco 2.0 commercial strategy.

Branding the product

The product/service differentiation route looks arduous. Internet portals already have hundreds of millions of users, so their mobile offerings have a network of buddies from day one. They have portfolios of advanced collaboration and community applications. Operators have little track record and investment in product innovations. That probably rules out product differentiation through features for most operators.

So for operator-provided services the options for most are probably fairly simple: “cheap” and “reliable”. The former is probably fairly self-explanatory. The latter raises some more interesting questions.

Many internet services have a tough time with reliability. Furthermore, there’s a culture of “integrate it yourself” — source your own hardware, security, support, connectivity. Although telcos aren’t much better, pretty much every Internet service has some terms along the following lines:

Google may at any time and for any reason terminate the Services, terminate this Agreement, or suspend or terminate your account. In the event of termination, your account will be disabled and you may not be granted access to your account or any files or other content contained in your account although residual copies of information may remain in our system.

Do you really want your life’s digital artifacts hostage to someone who could erase them at whim? The telco opportunity is to turn the sloth and expense of five-nines culture and lifeline service to its advantage. Make some strong promises about being there when users really need you. Then deliver.

Branding the platform

As operators recede from the services space, the successful ones will open their technology and business platforms and excel at partnership and joint marketing. They will still offer traditional mass-market services as a “hygiene” factor, but increasingly rely on third parties to complete the bundle. Value will be created through simplicity and integration of the total experience from awareness to post-sale support. This means adding on some APIs to enable partners to extend and improve the serivce, and integrate it with their communications and commerce hubs. Those APIs will also allow partners to access marketing, sales, logistics and support data.

In other words, telcos become market makers bridging users and other suppliers. Whilst we don’t have a canned branding strategy, here are some of the “market making” brands we’d draw inspiration from in creating our brand strategy. Each one is an enabler, not the complete end product or outcome.

	Windows	Joining consumers and applications developers
	Monster.com	Joining job seekers and employers
	Google	Joining searchers and advertisers
	Playstation	Joining gamers and developers
	iTunes	Joining music companies and consumers
	Betfair	Joining punters and bookies

We’d probably construct a similar list of services that are co-marketed as platforms, such as “Intel Inside”.

Co-marketed services and platforms are a very special niche. We’ll be looking at this a little more in our forthcoming Telco 2.0 report on Advertising-funded Services.

Branding the pipe

Few operators are rushing to embrace a “pipe” future (yet). Any such offerings are likely to either follow ISP brands, or be bundled into some larger entertainment or communications offering. We’ll let you know if the Christmas break inspires us as to how we’d brand such offerings. T-Mobile have got close with Web’n’Walk, but the “Plus” and “Max” versions (which are the real “dumb pipe” variants) still are bolted onto a service capability (Web), which isn’t wholly satisfactory. Ultimately, does anyone care about pipe brands? Maybe we’d look at “reliable transport technology” brands like Toyota or Honda for help.

Some closing thoughts

Brands are like children: each is unique, special and loved by a circle of devotees. There’s no one-size-fits-all brand strategy. Some companies like IBM have been masterful at brand management as various lines of business have matured. The horizontalising forces of mature industries have made IBM divest itself of all kinds of previously “core” functions, like hard disk manufacture and computer assembly. At the same time as it created new lines of business such as services and outsourcing. The brand adapts to these changes. Telcos will likewise have to respond to fix their tactical and structural issues and make the brand reflect those changes.

7:14:38 PM    comment   

You may have come across the business book Blue Ocean Strategy. The central idea is to create a new uncontested space in which to compete, rather than (ahem) “leverage” competitive advantage to compete against existing players. I’m sure these folk won’t mind if we quote the their summary diagram here in return for some Google link-love:

In many ways it complements Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma, which suggests the optimal strategy is often to compete against non-consumption. You could argue that this was Skype’s forte, by enabling new forms of extended casual conversation that didn’t fit in with metered minute anxiety. (Skypers don’t use any less standard telephony — Skyping is incremental use.)

I’ve been challenged to come up with a telecom Blue Ocean strategy, so here goes. It takes our earlier effort at a differentiated MVNO strategy to the next level.

My under-served market would be people of low credit and low mobility. Rather than treating them as a sub-prime market with pre-paid and lousy phones, I’d give them a service which is critically superior in communications functions, highly differentiated in method of sale, but doesn’t include the nationwide coverage that isn’t really valued by people stuck in the ‘hood.

I’d take a city with a large immigrant community as my base, and/or one with significant relative poverty issues. It would be in a developed country, so there’s money about. Maybe Marseilles in France, or before it was demolished New Orleans would have been the ideal location.

My “Blue Ocean” strategy might look something like the following “value chart” that they suggest:

I would partner with an equipment supplier looking to commercialise a new IP-friendly network technology such as Flarion or WiMax and who would give me a great deal on the hardware side — ideally, they’d see it as a marketing expense, not a revenue source. I’d bide my time to get some unpopular slice of spectrum, such as the 450MHz — preferably anything below 2GHz. This stuff has to work in buildings. (The perfect case would be some new unlicensed spectrum from the reallocation of old analogue services — we can live in hope.)

Together with my partner, I’d build low-cost handsets that would draw inspiration from things like the Motophone. I’d cut out all the nonsense that nobody uses (Java, full-featured browser, etc.). Yet I’d still retain “style” and personalisation features like faceplates and polyphonic ringtones. There would be a “bling” element to the handsets.

The handset would be optimised for voice communications and “social” features:

• Easy-to-use buddy navigation with simple presence features.
• Wideband audio.
• Exceptional handling of dropped calls (“We’re sorry, the connection has been lost. Hold to be re-connected, or press 1 to be called back when the other person comes back into coverage.”). We don’t want any support costs or customer dissatisfaction. Perception is everything — the Virgin Mobile MVNO brand scores better than Sprint and T-Mobile as hosts, despite identical coverage.
• Voice messaging would be included as default and given prominence. (Some research would be done to test the relative preference between voice messaging and push-to-talk.)

I’d also support IM, preferably with interconnect to existing PC IM systems as long as there’s no fee. SMS would not be an out-of-the-box feature. I’m trying to wean the kids off metered digital narcotics: “get one of these and we can message for free!”. Oh, and I’d encourage peer-to-peer (“pre-mesh”) radio capabilities, so if you’re close enough, the cell tower and network don’t need to get involved. Most people are communicating within close proximity, like kids in class.

Now for the biggie differentiators:

• No billing. On-net calls and messages are free, and no monthly charges. That’s right, I just fired Amdocs. Sorry, we love you, but this isn’t your game. Zero billing costs. No worries about change of address, fraud, etc.
• No live support. You can leave a voice message, and we’ll call you back when we’re ready.
• Handsets would come with embedded service for life. But lose it, and you have to buy another one. We’d have a password system to reclaim your old ID. Maybe even some kind of voice authentication. So our recurring revenue comes from carelessness and the need to be seen to have the latest handsets.
• You’d still get an inbound E164 (i.e. ordinary) telephone number assigned. We like termination fees.
• Off-net outbound calling would be entirely left to partners from the calling card industry. We’d have gateways to their 800 numbers (with some kick-backs from preferred partners), and would enable VoIP integration so that your caller ID was presented.

I’d anticipate the regulatory assault from incumbents, and throw in emergency calling as a feature.

Handsets would be sold via a mix of channels. The primary one would be small retail outlets and corner shops. I’d also work heavily with door-to-door loan salesmen. Whilst they have an external image as loan sharks, their customers see them as saviours: better to pay some short-term high interest rates rather than have your kid go to school without shoes or a uniform. Most customer would pay on credit — but the risk would be with the retailers and creditors, not me as a wholesaler. I’d also partner with cheque cashing stores, Western Union, etc. — anywhere that the credit-challenged (but often cashflow positive) hang out. I’d work out a mechanism for creditors to give online receipts for payment, and to be able to suspend outbound service for non-payment.

The first few thousand handsets would be given away free to kids. That’s the marketing budget done. Won’t take long before their parents buy a handset to stay in touch for “free”…

The geographic coverage would be the whole city plus some key gathering points around the periphery such as stadia, industrial areas and shopping/retail parks. But no further.

The handsets would feature advertising, and would have access to “sin” services such as lotto and gambling if enabled at the point of sale (where proof of age is required). This isn’t going to be part of your ethical investment portfolio, I’m afraid.

So, does it count as “Blue Ocean”? There are two sets of criteria. The first are very specific actions to take:

• Raise. What factors should be raised well beyond the industry standard? Answer: Elimination of “tolled minute anxiety” and replacement with flat-rate.
• Create. What factors should be created that the industry has never offered? Answer: Real-time communications service features such as wideband audio and presence, packaged into the standard product.
• Reduce. What factors should be reduced well below the industry standard? Answer: Mobility outside the area in which the customer lives and works.
• Eliminate. What factors should be eliminated that the industry has taken for granted? Answer: Billing and direct channels, and consequently most sales and support costs.

Looks like we’ve scored full marks there. And the second set:

• Focussed. Absolutely — a narrow under-served segment, who are also conveniently geographically clustered.
• Divergent. You bet — target market, product, payment and sales method are all differentiated.
• Compelling Tagline. “Free calls for life” — sounds like a winner to me.

Like the idea? Well, if you want some creative strategic thinking, you know who to call.

6:00:57 PM    comment   

We sent the summary results of our survey (What does Telco 2.0â[greater equal]¢ mean to Operators?) a couple of days ago. I am delighted that several respondents saw the light and decided to get the full results and tons of additional analysis in our updated market study and quarterly report.

Below are some of the results from the survey and some Frequently Asked Questions we have had from journalists about the survey and the market study. These snippets build on previous posts about the survey results.

Tipping-Points
For those of you that didn’t have time to complete the survey, we asked respondents to estimate when certain key tipping-point events might happen. A few smart people pointed out that we had not picked true tipping-points but more signs that the world was changing. Fair comment but the results were interesting nevertheless because they showed a number of these signs occurring in 2008 and 2009:

• 2008 was forecast to be the year Wi-Fi starts to enter the mass market (and 2009 when it becomes ubiquitous in cities). In 2008, respondents also predict a major European fixed incumbent operator will be bought out by a competitor (any guesses for which one?) and fixed VoIP will become mainstream.
• 2009 is the year when next-generation mobile broadband is forecast to be commercially launched in the form of Wi-Max, Flarion etc.

Interestingly, few people predict these technological changes leading to significant business model change in the near-term. Voice revenues were not predicted to fall to less than 20% of fixed operator total revenue until mid-2010 and most predicted that it would be 2011 (or never) that the same happened on the mobile side. It is interesting that BT claims that already voice revenues account for less than 8% of its business but, as a few pointed out, it is always difficult to separate voice revenue from connectivity (line rental) with the latter usually subsidising the former.

Leading Companies for Telco 2.0 World
We collected a huge amount of data about perceptions of company strategies. It has been very interesting to see which regions of the world and individual companies are perceived to be protectionist, dump-pipes, platform players or some combination of these. We also asked respondents to give their top-picks for leading operators in terms of preparing for the future.

It was remarkable how few companies were selected as leading Telco 2.0 lights, even in very fragmented markets like Europe where the Top 10 companies represented well over 95% of all selections. Unsurprisingly, BT was considered the leading company in Europe followed by FT/Orange. No sign at all of Deutsche Telekom in the Top 10 but a showing for tiny Iliad indicates the company’s ground-breaking strategy in France.

Verizon polled 45% of votes in the US despite the fact that it was also considered by more than 50% of respondents to have a protectionist (walled garden) strategy. Does this say something about the consolidated North American market?

Frequently Asked Questions
We have been having several calls with journalists and analysts following our press release about the survey and report. Here are some of the most common questions and our answers:

Can you give me the breakdown of participants in the survey?
27% from operators and services providers (17% Fixed/Converged, 6% mobile, 2% Internet specialist, 2% ISP); 15% NEP; 22% IT Vendor; 11% Telco disrupter; 25% Other (Consultant, Analyst, Academic).
49% West Europe; 27% North America; 24% Other (East Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Middle East and Africa)
49% Commercial functions; 40% Technical; 11% Other (Academic etc.)

Which type of operator has the most urgent need to change - fixed or mobile?
Difficult to generalise. This all depends on local market forces and company positioning. The survey and our analysis shows that fixed operators are currently leading the charge to the new world order so mobile operators have further to go. But the reason fixed operators are adopting new business models faster is simply that they have to - the barriers to entry for service providers are lower in their market. Mobile operators still enjoy the protection of licensed spectrum. IP has created a few holes and they are, quite rightly, exploring new opportunities and assessing threats (from such things as mobile VoIP) but they are experiencing less pressure on their walled gardens.

According to your survey, operators should move away from the walled garden business model?
Eventually, yes. But again the speed of change should be driven by the need to respond to external pressures. The walled garden model is VERY profitable and there is no point in operators putting existing revenues at risk until they have to. Operators will move form walled garden to more open strategies when they have to; the difficulty will be managing the migration from the old model to the new. Some will get this right, others will struggle.

So how can operators move away from the walled garden?
This is the $6 million (or $3 trillion) question that the industry faces. The Telco 2.0â[greater equal]¢ Initiative we set up is all about facilitating these changes through events, research, training and consulting. The survey did reveal some key barriers to change. These varied by market but there was a universal concern about VP and Director level management which suggests that respondents feel that EXECUTION skills are a key barrier to success. Concern about the lack of SERVICE INNOVATION in operators was also evident by the importance of service provider partnerships and in the support of structural business separation (allowing greater focus on retail/service delivery business). TECHNICAL issues are not seen as a major barrier hence partnering with IT-focused vendors is a low priority.

Is the business model you talk about more about adapting the advertising model?
Well, advertising is part of it. But advertising alone is not going to enable sustained growth when subscriber revenues from voice and messaging are under pressure. We believe that operators need to innovate in their core voice and messaging services and adopt new business models to grow. Advertisers are one example of operators moving to a new two-sided business model where they provide a platform for 2 groups (in this case advertisers and consumers). This requires operators to develop new skills and expertise and carve out a clear niche in the centre as Google has done with on-line advertising.

Isn’t the flat rate model (eg 3’s X-series) risky?
There are always risks if you are moving from a per-per-minute (metered) model to a flat-rate model. Not least, is the problem with cannabalisation of an existing revenue stream. Ultimately, we believe more and more operators will move to this open, flat-rate model and will have to manage the cannabalisation risk. The timing of this move will largely be driven by an operator’s market position - the weaker operators in the market, like 3 in the UK, will move first because they have less to lose in terms of existing revenue and more to gain from stealing market share from the market leaders. The risk (and therefore challenge) is greater for these leaders who will have to decide when the share loss to competitors like 3 is sufficient to justify the cannabalisation of their existing voice and data revenues and moving to a similar model. These are the players that need to be trialling these models now to learn about how to implement them effectively. Of course, some risk can be offset by thinking through how to position a new service or business model.

So do you see trialling as important?
Yes very. This came out very clearly in our brainstorm in October and I have no doubt that this will be confirmed in the one in March. This is a time of volatility and change with new competitors and business models springing up all the time - Skype, Blyk, 3’s X-series, etc.). Operators need to take a leaf out of the internet players and organise trials to learn about what services and business models will be successful. Trialling is not an excuse for poor service quality or leaving products in beta mode indefinitely but is critical way of supporting decision-making in a changing world. Try the Telco 2.0 incubator approach - more on this anon or drop us a mail!

5:55:04 PM    comment