This week at MWC I noticed that there were fewer cars on stands, less ‘out there’ IoT use cases and a greater dose of reality spiked with optimism that telecoms has turned the corner. The arrival of 5G is helping boost the vendor community, but what is perhaps more encouraging, is how many service providers are reinventing their businesses and upselling services that customers access from their devices. This is driving new opportunities and making a significant impact for the service providers. One good example of this is Orange Bank. At the end of 2018, Orange Bank had 248,000 customers in France and the plan is to launch in Spain and Poland soon and have an Orange Bank in every country where Orange operates as a telco.
Globe Telecom have stated that they want to turn the Philippines into the ‘Digital Capital of the World’, and have rolled out many new content partnerships to turn this vision into a reality. The upside is that this is driving profits for Globe and in the last year mobile data revenues have increased by a massive 28% and they now account for over 50% of total service revenues.
Adopting a strategy of opening up new digital service offers and moving away from old telco models means being able to quickly roll out new use cases and not being restrained by the legacy mindset, processes and systems. These use cases need to be managed and monetised by BSS. Traditional telco models supported by legacy BSS may have supported only a handful of use cases and it would have taken months (in some cases years) to upgrade legacy stacks to support a new use case. With new digital services being rolled out and 5G very much on the horizon how service providers develop, launch and monetise new use cases is changing dramatically. As for how many use cases service providers can consider – how about 101 for a start?
With this in mind, Openet has compiled a guidebook of 101 of the most innovative use cases that service providers are rolling out as they transform to become digital service providers and start to look at rolling out 5G. Many of the service providers covered in this guidebook are Openet customers. Some are not. We’ve used our judgement to collect, what we consider to be, some of the most innovative and impactful use cases that are out there.
The guidebook splits up the use cases into nine distinct areas. These are:
- Reducing Churn and Growing Lifetime Value
- Boosting Data Usage and Data ARPU
- Growing Your Subscriber Base
- Think Outside the Box
- 5G Use Cases
- Digital Transformation and Content Partnerships
- Second Brands are Back in Fashion
- Smart Devices
- Machine Learning and Data Insight
No doubt this time next year, we’ll be looking at many more new cases, which is good because it means that the much discussed ‘fail fast, learn fast’ mantra will be becoming reality. Service providers need to be able to just try new use cases out. If they work, great, make more investment and increase roll out. If not, then quickly move on. Being supported by digital BSS that enable the rapid development, deployment and monetisation of many new use cases will show that transformation is actually happening.
Download the Openet Guidebook: 101 Ways to Speed Up Digital Transformation and Get Ready for 5G
