Current trends in Telecom

Key challenges in Telecom

The telecom sector in India is continuing its growth momentum. The trend
continues – Indian Mobile subscriber base has now reached 635 Million
users, while number of telephone subscribers (wire line & wireless) in India
has increased to 671 Million for month of June 2010.
According to the latest TRAI report, the mobile tele-density stands at 52.30
and if the mobile growth rate continues at this pace – we should cross 1
Billion Mobile mark in less than 2.5 years (end 2012).

Although the ever increasing subscriber base results in lucrative

opportunities for the telecom market to flourish but at the same time the
decreasing ARPU is a serious concern for the telcos. The most challenging
issue for a Telco today is to generate new ways to increase its ARPU (ARPU
for a GSM is Rs 131 March 2010)

Rural India is a prime example of the opportunity. One of the biggest

challenges is to connect the balance 450 million currently residing in rural
India who are unconnected. But there are certain obstacles to penetrate
rural India:
• Revenue challenge: Rural India can pay for mobile services, but
only around $2 per month resulting in low levels of ARPU.
• Access challenges – These are extremely remote communities,
served by poor roads and no other significant infrastructure.
• Skills challenges – There are no trained telecom engineers and
few people can read or write. This makes the installation and
maintenance of GSM networks highly challenging.

The Indian telecom market is facing the challenge of hyper competition too.
With the presence of 13 service providers in India hyper competition poses
a great threat. Today acquiring customers is becoming difficult day by day.
Although an end user always gains, when there is an increase in
competition, for eg the recent price war initiated by Tata Docomo with the
initiation of per sec billing leading to decline of ARPU further, shows the
negative impact of hyper competition on the telcos while proving out to be
a blessing for the customers (the tariff rates in India are lowest in the
world).

The advent of MNP will make the customer retention more intricate. When
the customer will have the privilege to change its service provider without
changing its number the probability to the operator will lose a customer will
increase. Telcos will have to enhance their QoS and network coverage area
and also work upon their CRM to enhance the loyalty of the customers.

These are the various challenges faced by all the telecom today. The
customer today has become very demanding and the bar continues to rise.
The companies which can address these challenges will only be able to
survive in this highly competitive market.
 Innovations we anticipate in Telecom in next 5 years
Indian telecom has gone beyond borders. It has set global benchmark on
business optimisation and offered low cost models, while adding millions of
customers every month. But home grown telcos both operators and telecom
equipment makers including VAS players are yet to take up innovation as
their main thrust. They lack direction, R&D budget & Innovative approach
and execution abilities. Their main bottleneck is their R&D budget which is
not enough to address the market potential. What is interesting to note is
that whatever innovations and latest developments we see in telecom
industry in India these days are through these global players who
introduces them to Indian consumers. Indian companies in this regard are a
step behind. However, we cannot deny that many companies are doing their
bit to bring out new and innovative deals and services for users locally
these days.

Following are the few anticipated innovations in the field of telecom in India:-

• Improved Texting Technology:-

India is home to more than 600 mn mobile phone users and many of these
users don't know English, hence texting becomes a challenge for them. The
technology offers immense opportunities. For operators and VAS players,
the usability makes it possible for people to send SMS in regional languages
particularly when the focus of Indian operators is expansion in rural
markets.

• Customer Experience Index:-

In the wake of a fiercely heated landscape of telecom marked by constant
high churn, tariff wars and the imminence of mobile number portability; the
Indian mobile telephony industry has never been in greater need of tangible
index for customer experience. Customer experience which may be defined
as the sum of all the touch-point interactions (direct/indirect) that the
customer has with the service provider is undoubtedly the best indicator of
a service provider's performance.

• Open Unified Communications:-

While unified communications has grown rapidly over the past couple of
years, it hasn't matched the exponential growth of social networking
applications. Open can scan text and, when it spots words or other strings
that have been set up as key words, it can then perform one or more
predetermined actions. The decision to leave the configuration process 'as
open as possible', so that people could structure their communication in a
way that was natural to them opposed to reflecting a CTO or other
management mentality will be the key.This will be strategic importance to
OEMs as these functionalities will be part of their UC solution road map. This
not only will create the new business opportunities for the company but
moreover be a revolution in the communication.

• Personalized Charging:-
 Real-Time Charging and Policy has come up with an innovative
differentiator that turns a charging system into one of the most powerful
differentiators for a Communication Service Providers (CSP). Personalization
is not just changing service delivery. It's also shaping expectations. Today,
customers want voice, data, video, and music on one device. They want to
make VoIP calls while downloading messages. They want post-paid mobile
service at work and prepaid during personal time. They want to put
spending limits on their children's mobile downloads and many more.

Expectations from the lecture

In an age of stiffening competition, everyone in an organization must
develop a strategic mind-set by understanding the company's competitive
strategy and helping them execute it. Mobile/wireless communications,
services and appliances play an ever-growing role in all aspects of citizens
and consumers existence, for improving their personal and professional
quality of life.

To ensure durable growth of such consumer and citizen digital offers, it is

urgent to address thoroughly the trust and security challenge of Mobility.

The guest lecture should focus on how Smart Mobility platform intends to
reflect market and industry trends at the cutting edge of this new
application domain, from mobile applications development over the
viewpoint of mobile ecosystems to secure transactions and device
management?

Topics which could be covered during the lecture are:

• Bringing trust to Mobile phones
 Trust and Security in mobile phones remains a central question for
the whole mobile industry. Designing/developing secure and
convenient mobile services leads to rethink the approach of Digital
Security.
 Is the mobile terminal secure enough to protect sensitive
information?
 How is the smart security industry competing and/or partnering to
achieve the right way towards "Trusted Mobility"?

• Understanding Management, Deployment, Adoption & Diffusion of Mobile

Applications & Services
 Impact of Fixed, Mobile and Multimedia Convergence
 Economics of Security and Privacy of Mobile Ecosystem
 Cooperation between MNO/Service Providers/Banks
 Trusted Service Management
 Emerging Theories, Models, Challenges