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Gemini Waghmare shared his thoughts on the importance of identity management.  In his article, he pointed out that most operators used to differentiate by pricing.  For example, complex bundles, friends and family plans, and megabytes were used to attract customers.  Therefore, driving significant investment into charging platforms and product catalogs.  The main difference is the internet economy is running on one-click purchases, which mostly run on a flat rate.  Netflix, for example, has three price plans.  Facebook and Google make billions without charging a cent to their customers.

It’s not uncommon for operators to have upwards of 10,000 price plans.  Waghmare suggests that operators should deprecate the value of their charging systems and invest instead in cloud and flat-rate billing with added focus on collecting, normalizing, and monetizing user data.  By doing so, the scale and cost of BSS will drop dramatically.

Do you agree that simple subscriptions and user data over complex charging is more beneficial for operators?  Additionally, how difficult do you think making this type of change will be?

Read more here.

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Melanie DiGeorge
Community Manager
TM Forum
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Hello!

I've done my own little research not long ago. The main (and obvious) result I've achieved is that expenses in ifrastructure (i.e. mobile network, modern equipment for 4G, 5G etc.) carried by mobile operators exceed those of internet companies. So operators can't stop charging their customers yet. So some marketing initiatives like discounts, free of charge services etc are still used and billing can't be very simple.

Flat and simple charging is also a spread phenomenon (in Russia). So I guess it's beneficial for operators. But it doesn't require a switch of the billing system. IMHO such a switch is expensive too and it won't drop the scale and cost of BSS dramatically - still all subscriber activities must be charged (there is no fully unlimited tarrifs in Russia). So the complexity of the whole system and general requirements won't change significally.

But this fact does not deny monetizing user data. And all large operators try to do this.



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Sergey Bulatitskiy
NYXALE
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A true business transformation includes migrating from one form of revenue stream to another.  This process is fraught with risk, as it is not only the investments and working methods of the past that need to change, but also the ways of measuring what is "good".

If we look at the process that Microsoft and Oracle are currently navigating, you can gain a sense of the issues.  In both cases the organisations are moving from an up-front (Capex, if you will) revenue base to an ongoing (Opex, if you will) source.  The impacts on their business model and their cash flows are profound.  In both cases the organisations have been at immense pain to set stakeholder and market analysts expectations, and in this they have been largely successful as they are now held to their earnings estimates, and the obvious dip in revenue vs their past performance is managed.

The shift to different product monetization models within telecom will be as profound.  The revenue streams from the wasteful multitude of products will dry up before the investment in new products will deliver equivalent flows, and any CEO will have a hard time explaining why they are walking away from an existing, albeit shrinking, revenue source.

Transformation is really hard.

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Hugo Vaughan
IBM Corporation
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------Original Message------

Gemini Waghmare shared his thoughts on the importance of identity management.  In his article, he pointed out that most operators used to differentiate by pricing.  For example, complex bundles, friends and family plans, and megabytes were used to attract customers.  Therefore, driving significant investment into charging platforms and product catalogs.  The main difference is the internet economy is running on one-click purchases, which mostly run on a flat rate.  Netflix, for example, has three price plans.  Facebook and Google make billions without charging a cent to their customers.

It’s not uncommon for operators to have upwards of 10,000 price plans.  Waghmare suggests that operators should deprecate the value of their charging systems and invest instead in cloud and flat-rate billing with added focus on collecting, normalizing, and monetizing user data.  By doing so, the scale and cost of BSS will drop dramatically.

Do you agree that simple subscriptions and user data over complex charging is more beneficial for operators?  Additionally, how difficult do you think making this type of change will be?

Read more here.

------------------------------
Melanie DiGeorge
Community Manager
TM Forum
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