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Data-driven telecoms: navigating regulations

Regulation has a significant impact on global communications markets

Telco relationships with telecoms regulators and the governments that influence them are very important. For data-driven telecoms, telcos must now also understand the regulation of digital markets, and how different types of data are treated, stored and transferred around the world. Data-driven telecoms is an essential part of telecoms growth strategy. The massive growth enjoyed by the global tech giants, in contrast with the stagnation of growth in the telecoms industry, provides a significant lure for telcos, to harness data and become digital businesses themselves. Of course, this necessitates complying with digital regulations, and understanding their direction.

Additionally, by participating in digital markets, and digitising their own systems, telcos are necessarily working with and sometimes competing against the global digital, for whom this legislation is essential to their ongoing business practices. Political reaction against some practices of these digital giants is leading to some toughened stances on digital regulation around the world, and a tarnished public perception.

Most businesses are impacted by digital regulation to some extent, but it is those most deeply embedded in digital markets that feel it the most, especially the digital hyper-scalers. What do Google, Meta, Microsoft et al need to do differently as digital regulations evolve and new standards come into play? And for telcos, apart from compliance, are there opportunities presented by new digital regulations? How can telcos and the digital giants evolve their relationships with the entities that regulate them? Can they ultimately work together to create a better future based on the Co-ordination Age vision, or will they remain adversarial with lines drawn around profit vs public good?

What is digital regulation?

The report covers two important aspects of digital regulation for telecoms players – data governance and digital market regulations.

It does not cover a third theme in digital regulation – the regulation of potentially harmful content and the responsibilities of digital platforms in this regard. This is a complex and far-reaching issue, affecting global trade agreements, sparking philosophical debates and leading to some tricky public relations challenges for digital platform providers. However, for the purposes of this report we will set aside this issue and focus instead on data governance and the regulation of digital markets which have most direct relevance to telcos in particular.

Data governance is a large topic, covering the treatment, storage and transfer of all kinds of data. Different national and regional regulatory bodies may have different approaches to data governance rules, broadly depending on where they find the balance between prioritising security, privacy and the rights of the individual, against the need for a free flow of data to fuel the growth of digital industries.

Regulation around data governance also naturally splits into two areas, one concerning personal data, and the other concerning industrial data, with greater regulatory scrutiny focused on the former. The regulation of these types of data are necessarily different because concerns about privacy only really apply to data that can be associated with individual people, although there may still be requirements around security, and fair access to industrial data. Examples of data governance regulation are the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) concerning personal data, and The Data Act concerning industrial data, or the Data Privacy and Protection Act in the US. All of these examples will be discussed in greater detail in the main body of the report.

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Significant types of digital regulation

Source: STL Partners

Regulation specific to policing digital markets has emerged when regulatory bodies decide that general competition law is not sufficient to serve digital markets, and that more specific and tailored rules or reparations are needed. Like other forms of competition law, this regulation aims to promote fair and open competition and curb market participants deemed to possess significant market power. Regulations of this nature are always to some degree controversial, because the exact boundaries of what constitutes significant market power have to be defined, and can be argued to be arbitrary or incorrectly drawn. Examples of this type of regulation that will be discussed in depth later in the report are the Digital Markets Act in the EU, and the Innovation and Choice Online Act in the US.

A global perspective

The market for digital services is by its nature global. Digital giants like Google, Meta, Amazon and Apple are offering a wide variety of digital services, both b2b and b2c, all over the world. Those services will be provisioned using storage, compute power, and even human workforce, that may or may not be located in the country or even region in which the service is being consumed. Thus digital regulations, especially those concerning data governance, are globally significant.

A global market

Source: STL Partners

This report places significant focus on the regulatory agendas of the European Union and the United States. This is because these are two of the most significant and influential global powers in setting trends in digital regulation. This significance is gained partly by market size – in a global market such as that for digital services, regulations that cover a large number of potential customers are going to have more weight, and the European Union has a population of roughly 447mn, while the population of the US is around 332mn. The US also maintains its significant role in setting the digital regulatory agenda by actively seeking influence and leadership, while the EU has gained influence by being one of the most proactive, and stringent, regulatory bodies in the world.

Table of Contents

  • Executive Summary
  • Introduction
  • Important trends in data governance regulation
    • Regulation of the processing, storage and use of personal data
    • Regulation of industrial data
  • Regulation of digital markets
    • The Digital Markets Act: Governing digital monopolies
    • The US approach to digital market regulation
  • A global perspective – how EU and US digital regulation trends are spreading around the world
    • The Globalisation of the EU Regulation: The Brussels Effect
    • Digital Economy Governance in the US Foreign Policy
    • Digital in the EU-US Transatlantic Relationship
    • A Patchwork of Digital Agreements in Asia
    • A New Global Framework on Cross-Border Data Flows
  • Conclusion
    • Advice for Telcos

Related research

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How can telcos be loved?

Why should telcos care about being a ‘loved brand’?

If you are from an engineering or financial background, it can be tempting to look at branding and think it is a trivial or ‘soft’ aspect of business. This is valid in the sense that perceptions are inherently subjective, but this subjectivity does not mean that such perceptions are unimportant. People respond very strongly and instinctively to emotional stimuli. These responses are deep in our nature. We have evolved to quickly learn the characteristics of things that we want to repeat; the things we like. This extends to social behaviours too: Who do we want to be with, and be seen to be with? Which ‘tribe’ are we in, and who do we associate with?

Businesses have learnt a lot about this, because it has proved hugely valuable to the best practitioners, and the study and practices of marketing, advertising and branding have developed significantly in the past seventy years as a result. To be a ‘loved brand’ is a shorthand description of the ideal state.

What is a loved brand and what are the advantages?

Loved brands create strong emotional bonds with their customers, through a set of values and beliefs that customers can identify with and incorporate into their daily lives. In theory, businesses with loved brands have a range of advantages over others, which over time create significant financial benefits.

Business advantages for loved brands

Source: STL Partners

They enable businesses to charge a premium over other competitors as consumers pay less notice to the price of products sold by the loved brand.

  1. Loved brands can charge a premium over other competitors as consumers pay less notice to the price of products sold by the loved brand. Apple iPhones are generally more expensive than competitors’ phones with similar feature sets. However, many Apple customers remain loyal with the status of owning the latest iPhone outweighing the additional cost.
  2. The emotional bonds with loved brands can become so robust that their customers do not consider their competitors and forcefully defend the brand. Customers are even willing to forgive the brand for making some mistakes.In 2010, Ferrari recalled more than one thousand Italia 458 cars after reports that a design fault could cause them to catch fire.Despite the obvious negative publicity, which would have had a catastrophic consequence on many manufacturers, Ferrari’s strong emotional connection with its customers protected their position in the luxury car market.
  3. Customers become valuable promotors of loved brands on their social networks, pushing the benefits and encouraging others to join. Tesla provides a great illustration of this advantage, where many of the customers are not only delighted with their new electric vehicle, but they are also strong advocates in persuading their friends and family to purchase a Tesla for themselves.
  4. Loved brands attract the best talent, which helps the business to sustain its success.

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Table of Contents

  • Executive Summary
  • Loved brands
    • Why should telcos care about being a ‘loved brand’?
    • What is a loved brand and what are the advantages?
  • Challenges for telcos in being a loved brand
    • How are telcos viewed by their customers?
    • Why do telcos find it hard to be loved?
  • Common telco strategies that have had limited success to date
    • Focus on having the best network
    • Offering the lowest prices in the market
    • Differentiating on customer relationship
    • Offering content bundles
    • Launching new service innovation and diversification strategies
  • What strategies could telcos adopt to succeed going forward?
  • Case study 1: TELUS brand positioning
  • Case study 2: o2 Priority Moments
  • Case study 3: MTN – sustainable economic value
  • Case study 4: Telstra Health
  • Deep dive: What learnings can be drawn from successful strategies adopted by Orange
    • What has Orange done?
    • What has been the impact on Orange’s results?
    • How has strategy contributed to Orange being a loved brand?
    • What lessons are there for other operators?
  • How do others develop and sustain “the love”?
  • Recommendations for being a loved brand in the new era for telecoms
  • Index

Related research

 

Why CFOs must drive telecoms business model change

The telecoms operator’s conundrum – how to break the service innovation status quo

Telco CFOs need to upweight telecoms R&D investments to drive differentiating service innovations. If they don’t, telcos will recede further into the category of low yield, low growth commodities.

The relationship between a company’s financial and commercial model is complex:

  • The financial model determines the commercial model of a company – what commercial goals it is able to pursue and how it is able to pursue them
  • But the commercial model also feeds directly back into the financial model of the business and determines how resources are allocated

The interrelatedness of commercial and financial models means that change is sometimes difficult – a ‘chicken and egg’ situation occurs in which each model relies on change in the other before it can change.

This ‘chicken and egg’ situation is apparent within the telecoms industry:

  • Business owners within operators want their organisation to become more agile, more flexible, more innovative which implies having resources that can be (re)deployed quickly, but they find it hard to secure budget owing to the huge and slow capital investment programmes involved in upgrading networks
  • Finance departments at the same organisations want to deploy resources efficiently to maximise returns and capital investment in the existing business model (infrastructure that drives connectivity revenue) has a much stronger ROI than speculative operating expenditure in platforms and services that have (so far) proved unsuccessful

The result is status quo: the same financial model drives the same commercial model at a time when returns for core services are reducing every year.

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We start by mapping out the relationship between financial and commercial models…

In this framework, we use R&D operating expenditure (vertical axis) as a proxy for service innovation. We recognise that this is not perfect as service innovation requires much more than R&D. Nevertheless, it is probably fair to say that service innovation is unlikely to be sustained without material R&D expenditure.

Capital investment (horizontal axis) is a proxy for infrastructure build – developing assets which will generate returns over a long period of time such as buildings, manufacturing plants, telecoms networks.

Telcos are classic ‘Moat builders’, making money from capital investment in infrastructure and putting little into telecoms R&D investments.

The Internet giants and tech players typically start out as ‘service differentiators’, keeping capital investment light and instead focusing on flexible operating expenditure to drive service innovation. Increasingly however, they are investing capital in cloud computing infrastructure, to construct moats to protect their services – giving them cheaper distribution and better customer experience than smaller competitors.

A framework for understanding capex versus R&D spending

Source: STL Partners

…which reveals that telcos are moat builders and are radically out-invested in service innovation by tech players

Historically, for telecoms operators service innovation resulted from network capital investment because voice and messaging services were integrated into there were no alternative sources for communications – a customer had to use the service provider by the telecoms operator:

  • Telcos effectively outsourced innovation to Network Equipment Players (NEPs)
  • There was no need to invest significantly in R&D

Now, services are independent of the network (thanks to the internet) – telco customers can use communication (and other) services provided by dozens of third-parties and value has shifted to companies (such as the internet giants and tech companies) that invest in service innovation.

Telcos still invest only in infrastructure but value is increasingly in network-independent services so they are missing out on value-creation and are instead competing on price on the only commodity service that third-parties cannot substitute: connectivity.

R&D and capex % of revenue, 2020

R&D and capex telcos and hyperscalers

Source: Company accounts, STL Partners analysis

Proof point: Internet players are vastly more valuable than telecoms operators – and now they generate more revenue, too

Revenue and market capitalisation, Telco v Internet, comparing 2017 and 2020/2022

telcos internet players revenue market cap 2017 2020Note: Telecoms industry data represents 165 telecoms operators for 2017, but 78 top operators for 2020. However, operators outside the top 78 are unlikely to have a significant impact on revenues or market capitalisation. Source: Company accounts, stock market data, STL Partners analysis

 

Seven internet giants’ market capitalisation is bigger than the 78 top telecoms operators combined because:

Service innovation + moats  =  Revenue + profit growth  =  Future value creation

In other words, telcos’ current business model (financial and commercial models) are not deemed to be strong value creators.

The result is that capital markets demand that operators hand profits back to investors in the form of high-dividend yields so that they can invest in higher-growth companies.

In the rest of this report, we outline why CFOs need to drive business model change that will enable telcos to compete more effectively as ‘Service differentiators’, and four steps they should take to start this process – fundamentally increasing telecoms R&D investments.

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Why the consumer IoT is stuck in the slow lane

A slow start for NB-IoT and LTE-M

For telcos around the world, the Internet of Things (IoT) has long represented one of the most promising growth opportunities. Yet for most telcos, the IoT still only accounts for a low single digit percentage of their overall revenue. One of the stumbling blocks has been relatively low demand for IoT solutions in the consumer market. This report considers why that is and whether low cost connectivity technologies specifically-designed for the IoT (such as NB-IoT and LTE-M) will ultimately change this dynamic.

NB-IoT and LTE-M are often referred to as Massive IoT technologies because they are designed to support large numbers of connections, which periodically transmit small amounts of data. They can be distinguished from broadband IoT connections, which carry more demanding applications, such as video content, and critical IoT connections that need to be always available and ultra-reliable.

The initial standards for both technologies were completed by 3GPP in 2016, but adoption has been relatively modest. This report considers the key B2C and B2B2C use cases for Massive IoT technologies and the prospects for widespread adoption. It also outlines how NB-IoT and LTE-M are evolving and the implications for telcos’ strategies.

This builds on previous STL Partners’ research, including LPWA: Which way to go for IoT? and Can telcos create a compelling smart home?. The LPWA report explained why IoT networks need to be considered across multiple generations, including coverage, reliability, power consumption, range and bandwidth. Cellular technologies tend to be best suited to wide area applications for which very reliable connectivity is required (see Figure below).

IoT networks should be considered across multiple dimensions

IoT-networks-disruptive-analysis-stl-2021
Source: Disruptive Analysis

 

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The smart home report outlined how consumers could use both cellular and short-range connectivity to bolster security, improve energy efficiency, charge electric cars and increasingly automate appliances. One of the biggest underlying drivers in the smart home sector is peace of mind – householders want to protect their properties and their assets, as rising population growth and inequality fuels fear of crime.

That report contended that householders might be prepared to pay for a simple and integrated way to monitor and remotely control all their assets, from door locks and televisions to solar panels and vehicles.  Ideally, a dashboard would show the status and location of everything an individual cares about. Such a dashboard could show the energy usage and running cost of each appliance in real-time, giving householders fingertip control over their possessions. They could use the resulting information to help them source appropriate insurance and utility supply.

Indeed, STL Partners believes telcos have a broad opportunity to help coordinate better use of the world’s resources and assets, as outlined in the report: The Coordination Age: A third age of telecoms. Reliable and ubiquitous connectivity is a key enabler of the emerging sharing economy in which people use digital technologies to easily rent the use of assets, such as properties and vehicles, to others. The data collected by connected appliances and sensors could be used to help safeguard a property against misuse and source appropriate insurance covering third party rentals.

Do consumers need Massive IoT?

Whereas some IoT applications, such as connected security cameras and drones, require high-speed and very responsive connectivity, most do not. Connected devices that are designed to collect and relay small amounts of data, such as location, temperature, power consumption or movement, don’t need a high-speed connection.

To support these devices, the cellular industry has developed two key technologies – LTE-M (LTE for Machines, sometimes referred to as Cat M) and NB-IoT (Narrowband IoT). In theory, they can be deployed through a straightforward upgrade to existing LTE base stations. Although these technologies don’t offer the capacity, throughput or responsiveness of conventional LTE, they do support the low power wide area connectivity required for what is known as Massive IoT – the deployment of large numbers of low cost sensors and actuators.

For mobile operators, the deployment of NB-IoT and LTE-M can be quite straightforward. If they have relatively modern LTE base stations, then NB-IoT can be enabled via a software upgrade. If their existing LTE network is reasonably dense, there is no need to deploy additional sites – NB-IoT, and to a lesser extent LTE-M, are designed to penetrate deep inside buildings. Still, individual base stations may need to be optimised on a site-by-site basis to ensure that they get the full benefit of NB-IoT’s low power levels, according to a report by The Mobile Network, which notes that operators also need to invest in systems that can provide third parties with visibility and control of IoT devices, usage and costs.

There are a number of potential use cases for Massive IoT in the consumer market:

  • Asset tracking: pets, bikes, scooters, vehicles, keys, wallets, passport, phones, laptops, tablets etc.
  • Vulnerable persontracking: children and the elderly
  • Health wearables: wristbands, smart watches
  • Metering and monitoring: power, water, garden,
  • Alarms and security: smoke alarms, carbon monoxide, intrusion
  • Digital homes: automation of temperature and lighting in line with occupancy

In the rest of this report we consider the key drivers and barriers to take-up of NB-IoT and LTE-M for these consumer use cases.

Table of Contents

  • Executive Summary
  • Introduction
  • Do consumers need Massive IoT?
    • The role of eSIMs
    • Takeaways
  • Market trends
    • IoT revenues: Small, but growing
  • Consumer use cases for cellular IoT
    • Amazon’s consumer IoT play
    • Asset tracking: Demand is growing
    • Connecting e-bikes and scooters
    • Slow progress in healthcare
    • Smart metering gains momentum
    • Supporting micro-generation and storage
    • Digital buildings: A regulatory play?
    • Managing household appliances
  • Technological advances
    • Network coverage
  • Conclusions: Strategic implications for telcos

 

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Commerce and connectivity: A match made in heaven?

Rakuten and Reliance: The exceptions or the rule?

Over the past decade, STL Partners has analysed how connectivity, commerce and content have become increasingly interdependent – as both shopping and entertainment go digital, telecoms networks have become key distribution channels for all kinds of consumer businesses. Equally, the growing availability of digital commerce and content are driving demand for connectivity both inside and outside the home.

To date, the top tier of consumer Internet players – Google, Apple, Amazon, Alibaba, Tencent and Facebook – have tended to focus on trying to dominate commerce and content, largely leaving the provision of connectivity to the conventional telecoms sector. But now some major players in the commerce market, such as Rakuten in Japan and Reliance in India, are pushing into connectivity, as well as content.

This report considers whether Rakuten’s and Reliance’s efforts to combine content, commerce and connectivity into a single package is a harbinger of things to come or the exceptions that will prove the longstanding rule that telecoms is a distinct activity with few synergies with adjacent sectors. The provision of connectivity has generally been regarded as a horizontal enabler for other forms of economic activity, rather than part of a vertically-integrated service stack.

This report also explores the extent to which new technologies, such as cloud-native networks and open radio access networks, and an increase in licence-exempt spectrum, are making it easier for companies in adjacent sectors to provide connectivity. Two chapters cover Google and Amazon’s connectivity strategies respectively, analysing the moves they have made to date and what they may do in future. The final section of this report draws some conclusions and then considers the implications for telcos.

This report builds on earlier STL Partners research, including:

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Mixing commerce and connectivity

Over the past decade, the smartphone has become an everyday shopping tool for billions of people, particularly in Asia. As a result, the smartphone display has become an important piece of real estate for the global players competing for supremacy in the digital commerce market. That real estate can be accessed via a number of avenues – through the handset’s operating system, a web browser, mobile app stores or through the connectivity layer itself.

As Google and Apple exercise a high degree of control over smartphone operating systems, popular web browsers and mobile app stores, other big digital commerce players, such as Amazon, Facebook and Walmart, risk being marginalised. One way to avoid that fate may be to play a bigger role in the provision of wireless connectivity as Reliance Industries is doing in India and Rakuten is doing in Japan.

For telcos, this is potentially a worrisome prospect. By rolling out its own greenfield mobile network, e-commerce, and financial services platform Rakuten has brought disruption and low prices to Japan’s mobile connectivity market, putting pressure on the incumbent operators. There is a clear danger that digital commerce platforms use the provision of mobile connectivity as a loss leader to drive to traffic to their other services.

Table of Contents

  • Executive Summary
  • Introduction
  • Mixing connectivity and commerce
    • Why Rakuten became a mobile network operator
    • Will Rakuten succeed in connectivity?
    • Why hasn’t Rakuten Mobile broken through?
    • Borrowing from the Amazon playbook
    • How will the hyperscalers react?
  • New technologies, new opportunities
    • Capacity expansion
    • Unlicensed and shared spectrum
    • Cloud-native networks and Open RAN attract new suppliers
    • Reprogrammable SIM cards
  • Google: Knee deep in connectivity waters
    • Google Fiber and Fi maintain a holding pattern
    • Google ramps up and ramps down public Wi-Fi
    • Google moves closer to (some) telcos
    • Google Cloud targets telcos
    • Big commitment to submarine/long distance infrastructure
    • Key takeaways: Vertical optimisation not integration
  • Amazon: A toe in the water
    • Amazon Sidewalk
    • Amazon and CBRS
    • Amazon’s long distance infrastructure
    • Takeaways: Control over connectivity has its attractions
  • Conclusions and implications for telcos in digital commerce/content
  • Index

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How mobile operators can build winning 5G business models

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The chartpack for this report is available to download as an additional file

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STL Partners has long believed that telecoms operators need to and can do more to add value to their consumer and enterprise customers and to society more generally. For the telecoms industry, the need to do more is illustrated by flat or declining revenues and rising capital expenditure and debt levels. The opportunity for telecoms to add more value is also clear. The demands of society now call for greater coordination between all players and new technology – 5G, analytics, AI, automation, cloud – is now spawning the Coordination Age.

Figure 1: The Coordination Age – new paradigm, new telco purposeThe coordination age overview

Source: STL Partners

Operators have the credibility, skills and relationships to contribute more in the Coordination Age. But the opportunity will not drop into their laps. Improved networks are not, of themselves, the driver of new value: it accrues to the provider of services that run on the network and it is up to operators to develop platforms and services that exploit ubiquitous, high-bandwidth connectivity.

So far, operators have found moving beyond connectivity challenging. There are a handful of success stories; most attempts to develop vertical solutions have failed to move the needle. In this report, we draw on successes and failures from within and outside telecoms to outline 8 core guiding principles for ambitious leaders within the telecoms industry who are determined to help their organisations to deliver more than connectivity.

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5G: A catalyst for change

In some ways, the challenge/opportunity for mobile operators has been present for the last 5-10 years: limited incremental revenue growth in voice, messaging, and data.

However, 5G is a catalyst for real change. There are internal pressures from the investments being made that mean operators must create new revenue streams. More positive reasons relate to increased demand for telco-driven services and the technological changes that telcos have implemented which will help the commercial side to adapt. Below are some of the main reasons why 5G has created a resurgent need to change business models.

  1. Making returns on network investments: It’s a given that 5G cannot be delivered without significant investment by the operators: be it in spectrum acquisition, upgrading the RAN and core network, managing a more distributed architecture of small cells, etc. Telcos can focus on ensuring that network runs efficiently to maintain margins, however many will need to look to new services. Data usage will surge, but the price customers will pay for each gigabyte will decline at a disproportionate rate.
  2. Building on telco cloud and edge computing platforms: Telcos have started to invest in developing their networks to become more like the cloud platforms that underpin the large cloud providers’ services. In fact, it’s a key part of the 5G core. Part of this has been the move towards SDN, network virtualisation and integrating edge computing. This flexible platform will allow telcos to innovate quickly and create new differentiated services on top if they have the desire to change their financial and operational models.
  3. Unlocking an enterprise business: Before 5G, mobile operators’ enterprise businesses have involved selling SIMs to enterprise customers with some forays into value-added services, such as cloud storage, mobile device management and M2M communications. Enterprises are genuinely interested in 5G and the capabilities it brings. For some, 5G has become an umbrella term for technological innovation. This is a good thing for the mobile industry, as it means enterprises will open doors to telcos and be keen to engage them for new solutions.
  4. Creating business value: 5G’s unique capabilities will enable use cases that solve real problems, particularly in industrial transformation. This last point is exemplified by research STL Partners previously conducted on the business value 5G brings to certain verticals by enhancing productivity, increasing output, creating efficiencies, etc. However, much of this value is extracted by the applications, solutions and services on top of the underlying network.

Figure 2: 5G enabled use cases could increase GDP by $1.5 trillion by 2030

Source: STL Partners

Table of Contents

  • Executive Summary
  • Introduction
  • 5G: A catalyst for chang
  • Guiding principles for mobile operators seeking to move beyond connectivity
    1. Select priority verticals and how you will compete in the them
    2. Adopt a new approach to resource allocation: less CapEx and more OpEx
    3. Material OpEx should focus on building new skills, assets, capabilities, relationships
    4. Establish senior management commitment and independence for the new venture
    5. Focus on commercial as well as technological differentiation in order to disrupt verticals
    6. De-emphasise network integration – at least to start with
    7. Recognise that M&A will be needed for market entry in most cases
    8. Realise that organic growth can work in exceptional operator or market circumstances
  • Conclusion

 

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Apple Glass: An iPhone moment for 5G?

Augmented reality supports many use cases across industries

Revisiting the themes explored in the AR/VR: Won’t move the 5G needle report STL Partners published in January 2018, this report explores whether augmented reality (AR) could become a catalyst for widespread adoption of 5G, as leading chip supplier Qualcomm and some telcos hope.

It considers how this technology is developing, its relationship with virtual reality (VR), and the implications for telcos trying to find compelling reasons for customers to use low latency 5G networks.

This report draws the following distinction between VR and AR

  • Virtual reality: use of an enclosed headset for total immersion in a digital3D
  • Augmented reality: superimposition of digital graphics onto images of the real world via a camera viewfinder, a pair of glasses or onto a screen fixed in real world.

In other words, AR is used both indoors and outdoors and on a variety of devices. Whereas Wi-Fi/fibre connectivity will be the preferred connectivity option in many scenarios, 5G will be required in locations lacking high-speed Wi-Fi coverage.  Many AR applications rely on responsive connectivity to enable them to interact with the real world. To be compelling, animated images superimposed on those of the real world need to change in a way that is consistent with changes in the real world and changes in the viewing angle.

AR can be used to create innovative games, such as the 2016 phenomena Pokemon Go, and educational and informational tools, such as travel guides that give you information about the monument you are looking at.  At live sports events, spectators could use AR software to identify players, see how fast they are running, check their heart rates and call up their career statistics.

Note, an advanced form of AR is sometimes referred to as mixed reality or extended reality (XR). In this case, fully interactive digital 3D objects are superimposed on the real world, effectively mixing virtual objects and people with physical objects and people into a seamless interactive scene. For example, an advanced telepresence service could project a live hologram of the person you are talking to into the same room as you. Note, this could be an avatar representing the person or, where the connectivity allows, an actual 3D video stream of the actual person.

Widespread usage of AR services will be a hallmark of the Coordination Age, in the sense that they will bring valuable information to people as and when they need it. First responders, for example, could use smart glasses to help work their way through smoke inside a building, while police officers could be immediately fed information about the owner of a car registration plate. Office workers may use smart glasses to live stream a hologram of a colleague from the other side of the world or a 3D model of a new product or building.

In the home, both AR and VR could be used to generate new entertainment experiences, ranging from highly immersive games to live holograms of sports events or music concerts. Some people may even use these services as a form of escapism, virtually inhabiting alternative realities for several hours a day.

Given sufficient time to develop, STL Partners believes mixed-reality services will ultimately become widely adopted in the developed world. They will become a valuable aid to everyday living, providing the user with information about whatever they are looking at, either on a transparent screen on a pair of glasses or through a wireless earpiece. If you had a device that could give you notifications, such as an alert about a fast approaching car or a delay to your train, in your ear or eyeline, why wouldn’t you want to use it?

How different AR applications affect mobile networks

One of the key questions for the telecoms industry is how many of these applications will require very low latency, high-speed connectivity. The transmission of high-definition holographic images from one place to another in real time could place enormous demands on telecoms networks, opening up opportunities for telcos to earn additional revenues by providing dedicated/managed connectivity at a premium price. But many AR applications, such as displaying reviews of the restaurant a consumer is looking at, are unlikely to generate much data traffic. the figure below lists some potential AR use cases and indicates how demanding they will be to support.

Examples of AR use cases and the demands they make on connectivity


Source: STL Partners

Although telcos have always struggled to convince people to pay a premium for premium connectivity, some of the most advanced AR applications may be sufficiently compelling to bring about this kind of behavioural shift, just as people are prepared to pay more for a better seat at the theatre or in a sports stadium. This could be on a pay-as-you-go or a subscription basis.

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The pioneers of augmented reality

Augmented reality (AR) is essentially a catch-all term for any application that seeks to overlay digital information and images on the real-world. Applications of AR can range from a simple digital label to a live 3D holographic projection of a person or event.

AR really rose to prominence at the start of the last decade with the launch of smartphone apps, such as Layar, Junaio, and Wikitude, which gave you information about what you were looking at through the smartphone viewfinder. These apps drew on data from the handset’s GPS chip, its compass and, in some cases, image recognition software to try and figure out what was being displayed in the viewfinder. Although they attracted a lot of media attention, these apps were too clunky to break through into the mass-market. However, the underlying concept persists – the reasonably popular Google Lens app enables people to identify a product, plant or animal they are looking at or translate a menu into their own language.

Perhaps the most high profile AR application to date is Niantic’s Pokemon Go, a smartphone game that superimposes cartoon monsters on images of the real world captured by the user’s smartphone camera. Pokemon Go generated $1 billion in revenue globally just seven months after its release in mid 2016, faster than any other mobile game, according to App Annie. It has also shown remarkable staying power. Four years later, in May 2020, Pokemon Go continued to be one of the top 10 grossing games worldwide, according to SensorTower.

In November 2017, Niantic, which has also had another major AR hit with sci-fi game Ingress, raised $200 million to boost its AR efforts. In 2019, it released another AR game based on the Harry Potter franchise.

Niantic is now looking to use its AR expertise to create a new kind of marketing platform. The idea is that brands will be able to post digital adverts and content in real-world locations, essentially creating digital billboards that are viewable to consumers using the Niantic platform. At the online AWE event in May 2020, Niantic executives claimed “AR gamification and location-based context” can help businesses increase their reach, boost user sentiment, and drive foot traffic to bricks-and-mortar stores. Niantic says it is working with major brands, such as AT&T, Simon Malls, Starbucks, Mcdonalds, and Samsung, to develop AR marketing that “is non-intrusive, organic, and engaging.”

The sustained success of Pokemon Go has made an impression on the major Internet platforms. By 2018, the immediate focus of both Apple and Google had clearly shifted from VR to AR. Apple CEO Tim Cook has been particularly vocal about the potential of AR. And he continues to sing the praises of the technology in public.

In January 2020, for example, during a visit to Ireland, Cook described augmented reality as the “next big thing.”  In an earnings call later that month, Cook added: “When you look at AR today, you would see that there are consumer applications, there are enterprise applications. … it’s going to pervade your life…, because it’s going to go across both business and your whole life. And I think these things will happen in parallel.”

Both Apple and Google have released AR developer tools, helping AR apps to proliferate in both Apple’s App Store and on Google Play.  One of the most popular early use cases for AR is to check how potential new furniture would look inside a living room or a bedroom. Furniture stores and home design companies, such as Ikea, Wayfair and Houzz, have launched their own AR apps using Apple’s ARKit. Once the app is familiar with its surroundings, it allows the user to overlay digital models of furniture anywhere in a room to see how it will fit. The technology can work in outdoor spaces as well.

In a similar vein, there are various AR apps, such as MeasureKit, that allow you to measure any object of your choosing. After the user picks a starting point with a screen tap, a straight line will measure the length until a second tap marks the end. MeasureKit also claims to be able to calculate trajectory distances of moving objects, angle degrees, the square footage of a three-dimensional cube and a person’s height.

Table of contents

  • Executive Summary
    • More mainstream models from late 2022
    • Implications and opportunities for telcos
  • Introduction
  • Progress and Immediate Prospects
    • The pioneers of augmented reality
    • Impact of the pandemic
    • Snap – seeing the world differently
    • Facebook – the keeper of the VR flame
    • Google – the leader in image recognition
    • Apple – patiently playing the long game
    • Microsoft – expensive offerings for the enterprise
    • Amazon – teaming up with telcos to enable AR/VR
    • Market forecasts being revised down
  • Telcos Get Active in AR
    • South Korea’s telcos keep trying
    • The global picture
  • What comes next?
    • Live 3D holograms of events
    • Enhancing live venues with holograms
    • 4K HD – Simple, but effective
  • Technical requirements
    • Extreme image processing
    • An array of sensors and cameras
    • Artificial intelligence plays a role
    • Bandwidth and latency
    • Costs: energy, weight and financial
  • Timelines for Better VR and AR
    • When might mass-market models become available?
    • Implications for telcos
    • Opportunities for telcos
  • Appendix: Societal Challenges
    • AR: Is it acceptable in a public place?
    • VR: health issues
    • VR and AR: moral and ethical challenges
    • AR and VR: What do consumers really want?
  • Index

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Network convergence: How to deliver a seamless experience

Operators need to adapt to the changing connectivity demands post-COVID19

The global dependency on consistent high-performance connectivity has recently come to the fore as the COVID-19 outbreak has transformed many of the remaining non-digital tasks into online activities.

The typical patterns of networking have broken and a ‘new normal’, albeit possibly a somewhat transitory one, is emerging. The recovery of the global economy will depend on governments, healthcare providers, businesses and their employees robustly communicating and gaining uninhibited access to content and cloud through their service providers – at any time of day, from any location and on any device.

Reliable connectivity is a critical commodity. Network usage patterns have shifted more towards the home and remote working. Locations which were previously light-usage now have high demands. Conversely, many business locations no longer need such high capacity. Utilisation is not expected to return to pre-COVID-19 patterns either, as people and businesses adapt to new daily routines – at least for some time.

The strategies with which telcos started the year have of course been disrupted with resources diverted away from strategic objectives to deal with a new mandate – keep the country connected. In the short-term, the focus has shifted to one which is more tactical – ensuring customer satisfaction through a reliable and adaptable service with rapid response to issues. In the long-term, however, the objectives for capacity and coverage remain. Telcos are still required to reach national targets for a minimum connection quality in rural areas, whilst delivering high bandwidth service demands in hotspot locations (although these hotspot locations might now change).

Of course, modern networks are designed with scalability and adaptability in mind – some recent deployments from new disruptors (such as Rakuten) demonstrate the power of virtualisation and automation in that process, particularly when it comes to the radio access network (RAN). In many legacy networks, however, one area which is not able to adapt fast enough is the physical access. Limits on spectrum, coverage (indoors and outdoors) and the speed at which physical infrastructure can be installed or updated become a bottleneck in the adaptation process. New initiatives to meet home working demand through an accelerated fibre rollout are happening, but they tend to come at great cost.

Network convergence is a concept which can provide a quick and convenient way to address this need for improved coverage, speed and reliability in the access network, without the need to install or upgrade last mile infrastructure. By definition, it is the coming-together of multiple network assets, as part of a transformation to one intelligent network which can efficiently provide customers with a single, unified, high-quality experience at any time, in any place.

It has already attracted interest and is finding an initial following. A few telcos have used it to provide better home broadband. Internet content and cloud service providers are interested, as it adds resilience to the mobile user experience, and enterprises are interested in utilising multiple lower cost commodity backhauls – the combination of which benefits from inherent protection against costly network outages.

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Network convergence helps create an adaptable and resilient last mile

Most telcos already have the facility to connect with their customers via multiple means; providing mobile, fixed line and public Wi-Fi connectivity to those in their coverage footprint. The strategy has been to convert individual ‘pure’ mobile or fixed customers into households. The expectation is that this creates revenue increase through bundling and loyalty whilst bringing some added friction into the ability to churn – a concept which has been termed ‘convergence’. Although the customer may see one converged telco through brand, billing and customer support, the delivery of a consistent user experience across all modes of network access has been lacking and awkward. In the end, it is customer dissatisfaction which drives churn, so delivering a consistent user experience is important.

Convergence is a term used to mean many different things, from a single bill for all household connectivity, to modernising multiple core networks into a single efficient core. While most telcos have so far been concentrating on increasing operational efficiency, increasing customer loyalty/NPS and decreasing churn through some initial aspects of convergence, some are now looking into network convergence – where multiple access technologies (4G, 5G, Wi-Fi, fixed line) can be used together to deliver a resilient, optimised and consistent network quality and coverage.

Overview of convergence

Source: STL Partners

As an overarching concept, network convergence introduces more flexibility into the access layer. It allows a single converged core network to utilise and aggregate whichever last mile connectivity options are most suited to the environment. Some examples are:

  • Hybrid Access: DSL and 4G macro network used together to provide extra speed and fallback reliability in hybrid fixed/mobile home gateways.
  • Cell Densification: 5G and Wi-Fi small cells jointly providing short range capacity to augment the macro network in dense urban areas.
  • Fixed Wireless Access: using cellular as a fibre alternative in challenging areas.

The ability to combine various network accesses is attractive as an option for improving adaptability, resilience and speed. Strategically, putting such flexibility in place can support future growth and customer retention with the added advantage of improving operational efficiency. Tactically, it enables an ability to quickly adapt resources to short-term changes in demand. COVID-19 has been a clear example of this need.

Table of Contents

  • Executive Summary
    • Convergence and network convergence
    • Near-term benefits of network convergence
    • Strategic benefits of network convergence
    • Balancing the benefits of convergence and divergence
    • A three-step plan
  • Introduction
    • The changing environment
    • Network convergence: The adaptable and resilient last mile
    • Anticipated benefits to telcos
    • Challenges and opposing forces
  • The evolution to network convergence
    • Everyone is combining networks
    • Converging telco networks
    • Telco adoption so far
  • Strategy, tactics and hurdles
    • The time is right for adaptability
    • Tactical motivators
    • Increasing the relationship with the customer
    • Modernisation and efficiency – remaining competitive
    • Hurdles from within the telco ecosystem
    • Risk or opportunity? Innovation above-the-core
  • Conclusion
    • A three-step plan
  • Index

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New age, new control points?

Why control points matter

This executive briefing explores the evolution of control points – products, services or roles that give a company disproportionate power within a particular digital value chain. Historically, such control points have included Microsoft’s Windows operating system and Intel’s processor architecture for personal computers (PCs), Google’s search engine and Apple’s iPhone. In each case, these control points have been a reliable source of revenues and a springboard into other lucrative new markets, such as productivity software (Microsoft) server chips (Intel), display advertising (Google) and app retailing (Apple).

Although technical and regulatory constraints mean that most telcos are unlikely to be able to build out their own control points, there are exceptions, such as the central role of Safaricom’s M-Pesa service in Kenya’s digital economy. In any case, a thorough understanding of where new control points are emerging will help telcos identify what their customers most value in the digital ecosystem. Moreover, if they move early enough to encourage competition and/or appropriate regulatory intervention, telcos could prevent themselves, their partners and their customers from becoming too dependent on particular companies.

The emergence of Microsoft’s operating system as the dominant platform in the PC market left many of its “partners” struggling to eke out a profit from the sale of computer hardware. Looking forward, there is a similar risk that a company that creates a dominant artificial intelligence platform could leave other players in various digital value chains, including telcos, at their beck and call.

This report explores how control points are evolving beyond simple components, such as a piece of software or a microprocessor, to become elaborate vertically-integrated stacks of hardware, software and services that work towards a specific goal, such as developing the best self-driving car on the planet or the most accurate image recognition system in the cloud. It then outlines what telcos and their partners can do to help maintain a balance of power in the Coordination Age, where, crucially, no one really wants to be at the mercy of a “master coordinator”.

The report focuses primarily on the consumer market, but the arguments it makes are also applicable in the enterprise space, where machine learning is being applied to optimise specialist solutions, such as production lines, industrial processes and drug development. In each case, there is a danger that a single company will build an unassailable position in a specific niche, ultimately eliminating the competition on which effective capitalism depends.

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Control points evolve and shift

A control point can be defined as a product, service or solution on which every other player in a value chain is heavily dependent. Their reliance on this component means the other players in the value chain generally have to accept the terms and conditions imposed by the entity that owns the control point. A good contemporary example is Apple’s App Store – owners of Apple’s devices depend on the App Store to get access to software they need/want, while app developers depend on the App Store to distribute their software to the 1.4 billion Apple devices in active use. This pivotal position allows Apple to levy a controversial commission of 30% on software and digital content sold through the App Store.

But few control points last forever: the App Store will only continue to be a control point if consumers continue to download a wide range of apps, rather than interacting with online services through a web browser or another software platform, such as a messaging app. Recent history shows that as technology evolves, control points can be sidestepped or marginalised. For example, Microsoft’s Windows operating system and Internet Explorer browser were once regarded as key control points in the personal computing ecosystem, but neither piece of software is still at the heart of most consumers’ online experience.

Similarly, the gateway role of Apple’s App Store looks set to be eroded over time. Towards the end of 2018, Netflix — the App Store’s top grossing app — no longer allowed new customers to sign up and subscribe to the streaming service within the Netflix app for iOS across all global markets, according to a report by TechCrunch. That move is designed to cut out the expensive intermediary — Apple. Citing data compiled by Sensor Tower, the report said Netflix would have paid Apple US$256 million of the US$853 million grossed by its 2018 the Netflix iOS app, assuming a 30% commission for Apple (however, after the first year, Apple’s cut on subscription renewals is lowered to 15%).

TechCrunch noted that Netflix is following in the footsteps of Amazon, which has historically restricted movie and TV rentals and purchases to its own website or other “compatible” apps, instead of allowing them to take place through its Prime Video app for iOS or Android. In so doing, Amazon is preventing Apple or Google from taking a slice of its content revenues. Amazon takes the same approach with Kindle e-books, which also aren’t offered in the Kindle mobile app. Spotify has also discontinued the option to pay for its Premium service using Apple’s in-app payment system.

Skating ahead of the puck

As control points evolve and shift, some of today’s Internet giants, notably Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook, are skating where the puck is heading, acquiring the new players that might disrupt their existing control points. In fact, the willingness of today’s Internet platforms to spend big money on small companies suggests they are much more alert to this dynamic than their predecessors were. Facebook’s US$19 billion acquisition of messaging app WhatsApp, which has generated very little in the way of revenues, is perhaps the best example of the perceived value of strategic control points – consumers’ time and attention appears to be gradually shifting from traditional social into messaging apps, such as WhatsApp, or hybrid-services, such as Instagram, which Facebook also acquired.

In fact, the financial and regulatory leeway Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook and Apple enjoy (granted by long-sighted investors) almost constitutes another control point. Whereas deals by telcos and media companies tend to come under much tougher scrutiny and be restricted by rigorous financial modelling, the Internet giants are generally trusted to buy whoever they like.

The decision by Alphabet, the owner of Google, to establish its “Other Bets” division is another example of how today’s tech giants have learnt from the complacency of their predecessors. Whereas Microsoft failed to anticipate the rise of tablets and smart TVs, weakening its grip on the consumer computing market, Google has zealously explored the potential of new computing platforms, such as connected glasses, self-driving cars and smart speakers.

In essence, the current generation of tech leaders have taken Intel founder Andy Grove’s famous “only the paranoid survive” mantra to heart. Having swept away the old order, they realise their companies could also easily be side-lined by new players with new ways of doing things. Underlining this point, Larry Page, founder of Google, wrote in 2014: “Many companies get comfortable doing what they have always done, making only incremental changes. This incrementalism leads to irrelevance over time, especially in technology, where change tends to be revolutionary, not evolutionary. People thought we were crazy when we acquired YouTube and Android and when we launched Chrome, but those efforts have matured into major platforms for digital video and mobile devices and a safer, popular browser.”

Table of contents

  • Executive Summary
  • Introduction
  • What constitutes a control point?
    • Control points evolve and shift
    • New kinds of control points
  • The big data dividend
    • Can incumbents’ big data advantage be overcome?
    • Data has drawbacks – dangers of distraction
    • How does machine learning change the data game?
  • The power of network effects
    • The importance of the ecosystem
    • Cloud computing capacity and capabilities
    • Digital identity and digital payments
  • The value of vertical integration
    • The machine learning super cycle
    • The machine learning cycle in action – image recognition
  • Tesla’s journey towards self-driving vehicles
    • Custom-made computing architecture
    • Training the self-driving software
    • But does Tesla have a sustainable advantage?
  • Regulatory checks and balances
  • Conclusions and recommendations

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Why CFOs must start to drive telecoms business model change

The telecoms operator’s conundrum – how to break the service innovation status quo

Telco CFOs need to upweight telecoms R&D investments to drive differentiating service innovations. If they don’t, telcos will recede further into the category of low yield, low growth commodities.

The relationship between a company’s financial and commercial model is complex:

  • The financial model determines the commercial model of a company – what commercial goals it is able to pursue and how it is able to pursue them
  • But the commercial model also feeds directly back into the financial model of the business and determines how resources are allocated

The interrelatedness of commercial and financial models means that change is sometimes difficult – a ‘chicken and egg’ situation occurs in which each model relies on change in the other before it can change.

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This ‘chicken and egg’ situation is apparent within the telecoms industry:

  • Business owners within operators want their organisation to become more agile, more flexible, more innovative which implies having resources that can be (re)deployed quickly, but they find it hard to secure budget owing to the huge and slow capital investment programmes involved in upgrading networks
  • Finance departments at the same organisations want to deploy resources efficiently to maximise returns and capital investment in the existing business model (infrastructure that drives connectivity revenue) has a much stronger ROI than speculative operating expenditure in platforms and services that have (so far) proved unsuccessful

The result is status quo: the same financial model drives the same commercial model at a time when returns for core services are reducing every year.

 

We start by mapping out the relationship between financial and commercial models…

In this framework, we use R&D operating expenditure (vertical axis) as a proxy for service innovation. We recognise that this is not perfect as service innovation requires much more than R&D. Nevertheless, it is probably fair to say that service innovation is unlikely to be sustained without material R&D expenditure.

Capital investment (horizontal axis) is a proxy for infrastructure build – developing assets which will generate returns over a long period of time such as buildings, manufacturing plants, telecoms networks.

Telcos are classic ‘Moat builders’, making money from capital investment in infrastructure and putting little into telecoms R&D investments.

The Internet giants and tech players typically start out as ‘service differentiators’, keeping capital investment light and instead focusing on flexible operating expenditure to drive service innovation. Increasingly however, they are investing capital in cloud computing infrastructure, to construct moats to protect their services – giving them cheaper distribution and better customer experience than smaller competitors.

A framework for understanding capex versus R&D spending

Source: STL Partners

…which reveals that telcos are moat builders and are radically out-invested in service innovation by tech players

Historically, for telecoms operators service innovation resulted from network capital investment because voice and messaging services were integrated into there were no alternative sources for communications – a customer had to use the service provider by the telecoms operator:

  • Telcos effectively outsourced innovation to Network Equipment Players (NEPs)
  • There was no need to invest significantly in R&D

Now, services are independent of the network (thanks to the internet) – telco customers can use communication (and other) services provided by dozens of third-parties and value has shifted to companies (such as the internet giants and tech companies) that invest in service innovation.

Telcos still invest only in infrastructure but value is increasingly in network-independent services so they are missing out on value-creation and are instead competing on price on the only commodity service that third-parties cannot substitute: connectivity.

R&D and Capex % of Revenue, 2017

Source: Company accounts, STL Partners analysis

Proof point: Internet players are vastly more valuable than telecoms operators

Revenue and Market Capitalisation 2017. Telco v Internet

Source: Company accounts, stock market data, STL Partners analysis

Seven internet giants’ market capitalisation is bigger than 165 telecoms operators combined because:

Service innovation + moats  =  Revenue + profit growth  =  Future value creation

In other words, telcos’ current business model (financial and commercial models) are not deemed to be strong value creators.

The result is that capital markets demand that operators hand profits back to investors in the form of high-dividend yields so that they can invest in higher-growth companies.

In the rest of this report, we outline why CFOs need to drive business model change that will enable telcos to compete more effectively as ‘Service differentiators’, and four steps they should take to start this process – fundamentally increasing telecoms R&D investments.

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Telcos in health – Part 1: Where is the opportunity?

Why is healthcare an attractive sector?

  • Healthcare systems – particularly in developed markets – must find ways to treat ageing populations with chronic illnesses in a more cost effective way.
  • Resource strained health providers have very limited internal IT expertise. This means healthcare is among the least digitised sectors, with high demand for end-to-end solutions.
  • The sensitive nature of health data means locally-regulated telcos may be able to build on positions of trust in their markets.
  • In emerging markets, there are huge populations with limited access to health insurance, information and treatment. Telcos may be able to leverage their brands and distribution networks to address these needs.
  • This report outlines how the digital health landscape is addressing these challenges, and how telcos can help

Four tech trends are supporting healthcare transformation – all underpinned by connectivity and integration for data sharing

These four trends are not separate – they all interrelate. The true value lies in enabling secure data transfer across the four areas, and presenting data and insights in a useful way for end-users, e.g. GPs don’t have the time to look at ten pages of a patient’s wearable data, in part because they may be liable to act on additional information.

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Digital health solutions break down into three layers

Digital health solutions in 3 layers

This report explores how telcos can address opportunities across these three layers, as well as how they can partner or compete with other players seeking to support healthcare providers in their digital transformation.

Our follow up report looks at nine case studies of telcos’ healthcare propositions: Telcos in health – Part 2: How to crack the healthcare opportunity

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Can telcos create a compelling smart home?

Telcos role in smart homes

Part of STL Partners’ (Re)connecting with Consumers stream, this report analyses the role of telcos in the smart home market, which is now growing steadily in many developed countries, as consumers seek to bolster security, improve energy efficiency, adopt electric cars and further automate appliances. In most developed markets, there are scores of companies pitching often incompatible smart home products and services to householders, resulting in a fragmented mess in which consumers are often left to figure out what might work with what.

This fragmentation spells opportunity for both telcos and the major Internet platforms – both sets of companies can use their role as a supplier of a key part of the smart home proposition (connectivity and computing devices respectively) as a springboard into the smart home solutions space.

In the case of Apple, Amazon and Google that means using the smartphone, the tablet and/or smart speakers as a segue into this market, while telcos can build on their connectivity offering, which is a fundament to the concept of a smart home that can be monitored and controlled from anywhere.

The challenge facing both sets of players is essentially delivering the systems-level integration required to simplify the consumer proposition into a seamless end-to-end offering that will appeal to the mass market. Without coherent coordination, the smart home will continue to characterised by of point solutions.

This report begins with an overview of the smart home sector and the competitive landscape, paying particular attention to the strategies of the major Internet platforms – Amazon, Apple and Google. It then goes on to discuss Deutsche Telekom’s and A&T’s contrasting strategies in this space, before making some recommendations for telcos.

This report builds on previous STL research, notably:

This report is the first in a series looking at smart home/connected consumer propositions from telcos. Future reports will analyse how the leading Asian telcos are targeting this market, while exploring related propositions, such as connected bikes and scooters, pet tracking and asset monitoring and insurance.

The smart home market

In an ideal world, a householder would be able to remotely monitor and control all the systems in their home, simply by pressing a button to activate and deactivate heating, air conditioning, alarms, locks, cameras and appliances, such as washing machines and automated vacuum cleaners. Although this concept, known as a smart home, has been around for many years, it is only now beginning to come of age. The smart home could also become an enabler for the sharing economy, making it easier for people to rent out their homes, monitor energy usage and take out appropriate insurance cover.

Up until very recently, most so-called smart home implementations amounted to partial solutions, enabling a householder to check their energy usage or a CCTV camera, rather than get a complete picture of what is happening in their property. In other words, most suppliers have focused on discrete point solutions designed for a fairly narrow use case.

While homes in developed markets have a growing number of connected devices (such as televisions, sound systems, printers, smart meters and burglar alarms), they rarely exchange information and typically can’t be managed through a single app or desktop interface.

This lack of coordination is a result of the diversity of the many different players supplying consumers with connected equipment and services for their homes, ranging from utilities and security companies to equipment makers and tech companies.

The smart home value chain

Indeed, a smart home value chain can be very complex and diverse. To make a home really smart, you would typically need:

  • A central hub that can aggregate and analyse related data, such as energy usage and room occupancy. This hub could be in the cloud or a device in the home.
  • Middleware that enables connected things to exchange data with each other and the hub.
  • A large number of connected appliances, devices and sensors, ranging from boilers and washing machines to door locks and smoke detectors.
  • Suitable connectivity for all the components, which could be WiFi, Zigbee, Bluetooth or a cellular technology.
  • A user interface or interfaces, such as a voice-activated speaker or a touchscreen tablet or smartphone, the householder can use to monitor and control their home.

Today, most telco-led smart home implementations take an ‘inside out’ approach in which the hub is located in the home: short range wireless technologies collect data from connected devices, which are aggregated in the hub and are then made available to the consumer via a smartphone app. In this scenario, the hub is generally connected to a fixed-line network via WiFi. However, 4G and 5G technologies, such as NB-IoT and LTE-M, could make it feasible to connect more devices directly to a cloud-based hub, which could ultimately allow smart homes to emerge in the many communities not served by fixed-line networks.

In some markets, these two approaches may be combined: cellular connectivity may be used to back-up WiFi, while some data and services will reside in both the cloud and on a local device in case the wide area connectivity fails or is tampered with.

For telcos providing the underlying fixed-line or cellular connectivity, the sheer variety of players touting smart home products and services makes the market both complex and challenging. Figure 1, an overview of the smart home ecosystem produced by the GSMA, highlights how many different angles there are on the smart home concept. However, even this chart is an over-simplification – the smart home market also overlaps with the personal transport market to some extent. Some of the potential use cases, such as charging electric vehicles, require coordination between the consumer’s home and vehicle.

Figure 1: The smart home ecosystem is complex and fragmented

smart home market

Source: GSMA Intelligence

Size of smart home market

Given the breadth of the smart home market and the blurred lines between it and other segments, sizing it in dollar terms is difficult. Research firm Strategy Analytics estimates worldwide consumer spending on smart home devices, systems and services totalled US$84 billion in 2017 and will reach almost US$96 billion in 2018.

However, ABI Research is more conservative, pegging the global smart home market at US$56 billion in 2018. The actual number will be down to what products and services are included and whether analysts are counting the total value of an appliance or just the embedded connectivity and processing power.

For example, should the total sale price of a washing machine with built-in WiFi be included? Or should analysts just count the value of the connectivity module? What if the WiFi is never activated? In any case, it is clear that the market is growing steadily as the cost of adding connectivity to consumer appliances and devices falls. The cost of adding a WiFi or cellular module to an appliance is in the region of US$10 to US$20, depending how many frequencies it supports and which radio technology is used.

Contents:

  • Executive Summary 
  • Introduction
  • The smart home market
  • Sizing the smart home space
  • How important are smart speakers?
  • The Internet players and their strategies
  • The Internet platforms jostle for position
  • Amazon bets big on Alexa
  • Google plays aggressive defence
  • Apple plays the premium game
  • Facebook struggles to differentiate
  • Utilities/security companies
  • Consumer electronics/appliances
  • The role of telcos in the smart home
  • Deutsche Telekom offers data protection
  • Does DT need its own voice?
  • Differentiation through data protection?
  • AT&T changes course
  • Conclusions
  • A major opportunity to cut complexity
  • Internet players don’t have a stranglehold

Figures:

  • Figure 1: The smart home ecosystem is complex and fragmented
  • Figure 2: Amazon and Google face growing competition in the smart speaker market
  • Figure 3: Alexa is integrated into the control panel of Amazon’s new microwave
  • Figure 4: The new Google Home Hub is designed to be fairly proactive
  • Figure 5: Facebook’s premium Portal has a rotating screen and a video camera
  • Figure 6: The Magenta Smarthome app can manage temperature, security and lighting
  • Figure 7: Deutsche Telekom’s growing smart home service
  • Figure 8: DT’s new smart speaker
  • Figure 9: Some of the functionality available from AT&T’s Digital Life service
  • Figure 10: AT&T’s LTE-M enabled button works with AWS to perform a specific task

Personal data: Treasure or trash?

Introduction

This report analyses how the Telefónica Group is looking to reshape the digital services market so that both telcos and individuals play a greater role in the management of personal data. Today, most Internet users share large amounts of personal information with the major online platforms: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Tencent and Alibaba. In many cases, this process is implicit and somewhat opaque – the subject of the personal data isn’t fully aware of what information they have shared or how it is being used. For example, Facebook users may not be aware that the social network tracks their location and can, in some cases, trace a link between offline purchases and its online advertising.

Beyond the tactical deployment of personal data to personalise their services and advertising, the major Internet players increasingly use behavioural data captured by their services to train machine learning systems how to perform specific tasks, such as identify the subject of an image or the best response to an incoming message. Over time, the development of this kind of artificial intelligence will enable much greater levels of automation saving both consumers and companies time and money.

Like many players in the digital economy and some policymakers, Telefónica is concerned that artificial intelligence will be subject to a winner-takes-all dynamic, ultimately stifling competition and innovation. The danger is that the leading Internet platforms’ unparalleled access to behavioural data will enable them to develop the best artificial intelligence systems, giving them an unassailable advantage over newcomers to the digital economy.

This report analyses Telefónica’s response to this strategic threat, as well as examining the actions of NTT DOCOMO, another telco that has sought to break the stranglehold of the Internet platforms on personal data. Finally, it considers whether Mint, a web service that has succeeded in persuading millions of Americans to share very detailed financial information, could be a model for telco’s personal data propositions.

As well as revisiting some of the strategic themes raised in STL Partners’ 2013 digital commerce strategy report, this report builds on the analysis in three recent STL Partners’ executive briefings that explore the role of telcos in digital commerce:

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In pursuit of personal cloud services

For the best part of a decade, STL Partners has been calling for telcos to give customers greater control over their personal data. In doing so, telcos could differentiate themselves from most of the major Internet players in the eyes of both consumers and regulators. But now, the entire digital economy is moving in this direction, partly because the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires companies operating in the EU to give consumers more control and partly because of the outcry over the cavalier data management practices of some Internet players, particularly Facebook.

In a world in which everyone is talking about protecting personal data and privacy, is there still scope for telcos to differentiate themselves and strengthen their relationships with consumers?

In a strategy report published in October 2013, STL Partners argued that there were two major strategic opportunities for telcos in the digital commerce space:

  1. Real-time commerce enablement: The use of mobile technologies and services to optimise all aspects of commerce. For example, mobile networks can deliver precisely targeted and timely marketing and advertising to consumer’s smartphones, tablets, computers and televisions.
  2. Personal cloud: Act as a trusted custodian for individuals’ data and an intermediary between individuals and organisations, providing authentication services, digital lockers and other services that reduce the risk and friction in every day interactions. An early example of this kind of service is financial services web site Mint.com (profiled in this report). As personal cloud services provide personalised recommendations based on individuals’ authorised data, they could potentially engage much more deeply with consumers than the generalised decision-support services, such as Google, TripAdvisor, moneysavingexpert.com and comparethemarket.com, in widespread use today.

Back in October 2013, STL Partners saw those two opportunities as inter-related — they could be combined in a single platform. The report argued that telcos should start with mobile commerce, where they have the strongest strategic position, and then use the resulting data, customer relationships and trusted brand to expand into personal cloud services, which will require high levels of investment.

Today, telcos’ traction in mobile commerce remains limited — only a handful of telcos, such as Safaricom, Turkcell, KDDI and NTT Docomo, have really carved out a significant position in this space. Although most telcos haven’t been able or willing to follow suit, they could still pursue the personal cloud value proposition outlined in the 2013 report. For consumers, effective personal cloud services will save time and money. The ongoing popularity of web comparison and review services, such as comparethemarket.com, moneysavingexpert.com and TripAdvisor, suggests that consumers continue to turn to intermediaries to help through them cut through the “marketing noise” on the Internet. But these existing services provide limited personalisation and can’t necessarily join the dots across different aspects of an individual’s lives. For example, TripAdvisor isn’t necessarily aware that a user is a teacher and can only take a vacation during a school holiday.

STL Partners believes there is latent demand for trusted and secure online services that act primarily on behalf of individuals, providing tailored advice, information and offers. This kind of personal cloud could evolve into a kind of vendor relationship management service, using information supplied by the individual to go and source the most appropriate products and services.

The broker could analyse a combination of declared, observed and inferred data in a way that is completely transparent to the individual. This data should be used primarily to save consumers time and give them relevant information that will enrich their lives. Instead of just putting the spotlight on the best price, as comparison web sites do, personal cloud services should put the spotlight on the ‘right’ product or service for the individual.

Ideally, a mature personal cloud service will enrich consumers’ lives by enabling them to quickly discover products, services and places that are near perfect or perfect for them. Rather than having to conduct hours of research or settle for second-best, the individual should be able to use the service to find exactly the right product or service in a few minutes. For example, an entertainment service might alert you to a concert by an upcoming band that fits closely with your taste in music, while a travel site will know you like quiet, peaceful hotels with sea views and recommend places that meet that criteria.

As a personal cloud service will need to be as useful as possible to consumers, it will need to attract as many merchants and brands as possible. In 2013, STL Partners argued that telcos could do that by offering merchants and brands a low risk proposition: they will be able to register to have their products and services included in the personal cloud for free and they will only have to pay commission if the consumer actually purchases one of their products and services. In the first few years, in order to persuade merchants and brands to actually use the site the personal cloud will have to charge a very low commission and, in some cases, none at all.

Since October 2013, much has changed. But the personal cloud opportunity is still valid and some telcos continue to explore how they can get closer to consumers. One of the most prominent of these is Madrid-based Telefónica, which has operations in much of Europe and across Latin America. The next chapter outlines Telefónica’s strategy in the personal data domain.

Contents:

  • Executive Summary
  • Recommendations for telcos
  • Introduction
  • In pursuit of personal cloud services
  • Telefonica’s personal data strategy
  • Questioning the status quo
  • Backing blockchains
  • Takeaways
  • What is Telefónica actually doing?
  • The Aura personal assistant
  • Takeaways
  • Telefonica’s external bets
  • Investment in Wibson
  • Partnership with People.io
  • The Data Transparency Lab
  • Takeaways
  • Will Telefónica see financial benefits?
  • Takeaways
  • What can Telefónica learn from DOCOMO?
  • DOCOMO’s Evolving Strategy
  • Takeaways
  • Mint – a model for a telco personal data play?
  • Takeaways

Figures:

  • Figure 1: Telefónica’s tally of active users of the major apps
  • Figure 2: Telefónica’s view of digital market openness in Brazil
  • Figure 3: Investors’ valuation of Internet platforms implies long-term dominance
  • Figure 4: Key metrics for Telefónica’s four platforms
  • Figure 5: How Wibson intends to allow individuals to trade their data
  • Figure 6: Telefónica’s digital services business is growing steadily
  • Figure 7: Telefónica’s pay TV business continues to expand
  • Figure 8: DOCOMO’s Smart Life division has struggle to grow
  • Figure 9: NTT DOCOMO’s new strategy puts more emphasis on enablers
  • Figure 10: DOCOMO continues to pursue the concept of a personal assistant
  • Figure 11: DOCOMO is using personal data to enable new financial services
  • Figure 12: Mint provides users with advice on how to manage their money
  • Figure 13: Intuit sees Mint as a strategically important engagement tool

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Uber and Tesla: What telcos should do

Introduction

This report analyses the market position and strategies of Tesla and Uber, two of four Internet-based disruptors that might be able to break into the top tier of consumer Internet players, which is made up of Amazon, Apple, Facebook or Google. The other two challengers – Spotify and Netflix – were the subject of the recent STL Partners report: Can Netflix and Spotify make the leap to the top tier?

Tesla, Uber, Spotify and Netflix are defined by three key factors, which set them aside from their fellow challengers:

  • Rapid rise: They have become major mainstream players in a short space of time, building world-leading brands that rival those of much older and more established companies.
  • New thinking: Each of the four have challenged the conventions of the industries in which they operate, driving disruption and forcing incumbents to re-evaluate their business models.
  • Potential to challenge the dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook or Google: This rapid success has allowed the companies to gain dominant positions in their relative sectors, which they could use as a springboard to diversify their business models into parallel verticals. By pursuing these economies of scope, they are treading the path taken by the big four Internet companies.

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This report explores how improvements in digital technologies and consumer electronics are changing the automotive market, enabling Tesla and Uber to rethink personal transport almost from the bottom up. In particular, it considers how self-driving vehicles could become a key platform within the digital economy, offering a range of commerce services linked to transportation and logistics. The report also explores how the high level of regulation in transportation, as in telecoms, is complicating Uber’s efforts to build economies of scale and scope.

The final section provides a high-level overview of the opportunities for telcos as the automobile becomes a major computing and connectivity platform, including partnership strategies, and the implications for telcos if Uber or Tesla were able to make the jump to become a tier one player.

The report builds on the analysis in two previous STL Partners’ executive briefings that explore how artificial intelligence is changing the automotive sector:

Self-driving disruption

Uber, the world’s leading ride-hailing app, and Tesla, the world’s leading producer of all-electric vehicles, could evolve to become tier one players in the digital economy, as the car could eventually become a major control point in the digital value chain. Both companies could use the disruption caused by the arrival of self-driving cars to become a broad digital commerce platform akin to that of Amazon or Google.  As well as matching individuals with journeys, Uber is gearing up to use self-driving vehicles to connect people with shops, restaurants, bars and many other merchants and service providers.  With a strong brand, Tesla could potentially play a similar role in the premium end of the market as Apple has done in the PC, tablet and smartphone sectors.

However, Uber and Tesla are just two of the scores of technology and automotive companies jostling for a preeminent position in a future in which the car is a major computing and connectivity platform. As well as investing heavily in the development of self-driving technologies, many of these companies are splurging on M&A to get the skills and competences they will need in the personal transportation market of the future.  For example, Intel bought Mobileye, a maker of autonomous-driving systems, for US$15.3 billion in March 2017. Delphi, a big auto parts maker, bought nuTonomy, an autonomous vehicle start-up, for US$450 million, and has since reinvented itself as an autonomous vehicle company called Aptiv.

Self-driving vehicles will change the world and the way people live in a myriad of different ways, just as cars themselves transformed society during the 20th century. Some shops, hotels and restaurants could become mobile, while car parks, garages and even traffic lights could eventually become obsolete, potentially heralding new business opportunities for many kinds of companies, including telcos. But the most important change for Uber and Tesla will be a widespread shift from owning cars to sharing cars.

Contents:

  • Executive Summary
  • How Uber and Tesla are creating new opportunities for telcos
  • Uber’s and Tesla’s future prospects
  • Lessons for telcos
  • Introduction
  • Self-driving disruption
  • Making car ownership obsolete
  • From here to autonomy
  • The convergence of car rental, taxi-hailing and car making
  • Business models beyond transport
  • Opportunities for telcos
  • Uber: At the bleeding edge
  • Uber’s chequered history
  • Uber looks beyond the car
  • Uber’s strengths and weaknesses: From fame to notoriety
  • Tesla: All electric dreams
  • Tesla’s strengths and weaknesses: Beautiful but small
  • Conclusions and lessons for telcos
  • The future of Uber and Tesla
  • The future of connected cars
  • Lessons from Uber and Tesla

Figures:

  • Figure 1: Self-driving vehicles will become commonplace by 2030
  • Figure 2: The two different routes to self-driving vehicles
  • Figure 3: The first self-driving cars could appear within two years
  • Figure 4: Money is pouring into ride hailing and self-driving companies
  • Figure 5: Waymo is way ahead with respect to self-driving disengagements
  • Figure 6: Uber’s vision of a “vertiport” serving a highway intersection
  • Figure 7: Uber believes VTOL can be much cheaper than helicopters
  • Figure 8: Uber’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis
  • Figure 9: Growth in Tesla’s automotive revenues has been subdued
  • Figure 10: Tesla’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats
  • Figure 11: Tesla loses money most quarters
  • Figure 12: Tesla is having to cut back on capex

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RCS: Walking the commerce tightrope

Introduction

Thanks initially to WeChat in China and now Facebook in the west, mobile messaging is fast becoming a key platform for digital commerce, mounting a challenge to Google Search, Amazon’s Marketplace and other two-sided platforms.

As explained in our June 2016 report, Google/Telcos’ RCS: Dark Horse or Dead Horse?, many of the world’s largest telcos are working with Google to develop and deploy multimedia communications services using the RCS specification. Like SMS, RCS is intended to work across networks, be network-based and be the default mobile messaging service, but it also goes far beyond SMS, by supporting rich features, such as video calling, location sharing, group chat and file sharing.  Proponents of RCS believe it can ultimately offer greater reach, reliability, privacy and security than online messaging services, such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and WeChat.

The rollout of RCS-based services was one of the strategic options explored in STL Partners’ April 2017 report, Consumer communications: Can telcos mount a comeback?, which made different recommendations for different kinds of telcos. It argued that strong incumbent telcos in markets where the Internet players are also strong, such as AT&T, Verizon, BT and Deutsche Telekom, should seek to differentiate their communications proposition through reliability, security, privacy and reach, while also embedding communications into other services.

Building on those two reports, this executive briefing analyses the progress of RCS over the past two years, considering the development of business tools for the specification, while outlining Facebook Messenger’s, WhatsApp’s and Apple’s simultaneous push into the market for so-called conversational commerce, in which messaging and transactions are increasingly interwoven. It concludes by updating the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis in the June 2016 report and the subsequent recommendations for telcos.

RCS: What has changed in the past two years?

New networks, more interoperability and rising usage

The RCS (Rich Communications Services) specification, the heir apparent to SMS, has been around for a decade. Whereas SMS’s functionality is limited by its usage of old-school mobile technology, RCS employs Internet protocols to provide a raft of features similar to those available from leading chat apps. However, up until now, RCS has had little impact on the mobile messaging market – WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Apple’s iMessage and other chat apps have been accumulating hundreds of millions of users, diminishing the role of mobile operators in this key pillar of the communications market.

But RCS, which is steered by the GSMA, seems to be finally gaining some traction: In 2017, RCS launches almost doubled from 30 to 55 and have the potential to double again in 2018, according to the GSMA. In December 2017, for example, América Movil, Telefónica, Oi and AT&T launched RCS messaging services to subscribers across Latin America. Although it will only work on handsets running Android, GSMA Intelligence estimates approximately 60% of subscribers across the Latin American region will be able to get access to the RCS messaging service. América Movil and Telefónica also plan to launch RCS Messaging in the UK, Germany, Spain, Austria and Central and Eastern Europe. As a result of these launches, GSMA Intelligence expects the number of active monthly RCS users to grow to 350 million by the end of 2018, from 159 million at the start of the year. However, for a messaging service, daily active users are a far more important metric than monthly active users.

To support RCS, telcos either need to embed an Internet multimedia subsystem (IMS) into their networks or used a cloud-based system that sits outside the network. The latter option requires less upfront capex and enables a quicker deployment. In Latin America, the operators are using the Jibe RCS Cloud from Google and the Jibe RCS Hub, thereby ensuring interoperability so that subscribers can send RCS messages across networks. Subscribers from other networks connected to the hub will also be able to send RCS messages regardless of their geographic location. Operators’ RCS networks are also being interconnected in other parts of the Americas and Europe. América Móvil, Rogers Communications and Sprint have interconnected their networks across the Americas, while Deutsche Telekom, Telenor Group, Telia Company and Vodafone Group have interconnected in Europe, enabling subscribers in these regions to access advanced RCS across 22 networks in 17 countries.

Contents:

  • Executive Summary
  • Introduction
  • RCS: What has changed in the past two years?
  • New networks, more interoperability and rising usage
  • Consistency is king
  • Vodafone’s sustained support for RCS
  • Google is finally prioritising RCS
  • Android Messages overshadows Allo
  • Android device makers mostly on board
  • What will Apple do?
  • Competing for the business messaging market
  • Facebook pushes into business messaging
  • The Facebook brand loses its lustre
  • How will RCS fare in the business market?
  • Veon tries a different route
  • Conclusions and Recommendations

Figures:

  • Figure 1: Recommendations for telcos in mobile messaging
  • Figure 2: The companies supporting the RCS Universal Profile
  • Figure 3: RCS now has a feature set designed for business-to-person usage
  • Figure 4: Vodafone is using RCS to promote its new pet tracking service
  • Figure 5: The iPhone accounts for less than one-fifth of the smartphones in use today
  • Figure 6: The pros and cons of Apple’s strategic options for iMessage
  • Figure 7: SMS still leads the Internet-based services in some metrics
  • Figure 8:  Using Facebook Messenger to book an in-store appointment
  • Figure 9: Almost 1.5 billion people access Facebook every day
  • Figure 10: The emerging ecosystem around RCS messaging-as-a-platform
  • Figure 11: Next steps for telcos in all-IP communications
  • Figure 12: China Mobile’s SMS traffic per customer has stabilised
  • Figure 13: Messaging is generating less and less revenue for China Mobile

Telcos and GAFA: Dancing with the disruptors

Introduction

Across much of the world, the competing Internet ecosystems led by Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google have come to dominate the consumer market for digital services. Even though most telcos continue to compete with these players in the service layer, it is now almost a necessity for operators to partner with one or more of these ecosystems in some shape or form.

This report begins by pinpointing the areas where telcos are most likely to partner with these players, drawing on examples as appropriate. In each case, it considers the nature of the partnership and the resulting value to the telco and to the Internet ecosystem. It also considers the longer-term, strategic implications of these partnerships and makes recommendations on how telcos can try to strengthen their negotiating position.

This research builds on the findings of the Digital Partnerships Benchmarking Study conducted between 26th September and 4th November 2016 by STL Partners and sponsored by AsiaInfo. That study involved a survey of 34 operators in Europe and Asia Pacific. It revealed that whereas almost all operators expected to grow their partnerships business in the future, they differed on how they expected to pursue this growth.

Approximately half (46%) of the operator respondents wanted to scale up and partner with a large number of digital players, while the other half (49%) wanted to focus in on a few strategic partnerships.  Those looking to partner with a large number of companies were primarily interested in generating new revenue streams or increasing customer relevance, while many of those who wanted to focus on a small number of partnerships also regarded increasing revenues from the core business as a main objective (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: The business objectives differ somewhat by partnership strategy

Source: Digital Partnerships Benchmarking Study conducted in late 2016 by STL Partners and sponsored by AsiaInfo

Respondents were also asked to rank the assets that an operator can bring to a partnership, both today and in the future. These ranks were converted into a normalized score (see Figure 2): A score of 100% in Figure 2 would indicate that all respondents placed that option in the top rank.

Figure 2: Operators regard their customer base as their biggest asset

Source: Digital Partnerships Benchmarking Study conducted in late 2016 by STL Partners and sponsored by AsiaInfo

Clearly, operators are aware that the size of their customer base is a significant asset, and they are optimistic that it is likely to remain so: it is overall the highest scoring asset both today and in the future.

In the future, the options around customer data (customer profiling, analytics and insights) are given higher scores (they move up the ranks). This suggests that operators believe that they will become better at exploiting their data-centric assets and – most significantly – that they will be able to monetize this in partnerships, and that these data-centric assets will have significant value.

The findings of the study confirm that most telcos believe they can bring significant and valuable assets to partnerships. This report considers how those assets can be used to strike mutually beneficial deals with the major Internet ecosystems. The next chapter explains why telcos and the leading Internet players need to co-operate with each other, despite their competition for consumers’ attention.

Contents:

  • Executive Summary
  • Strategic considerations
  • Delivering bigger, better entertainment
  • Improving customer experience
  • Extending and enhancing connectivity
  • Developing the networks of the future
  • Delivering cloud computing to enterprises
  • Introduction
  • Telcos and lnternet giants need each other
  • Delivering bigger, better entertainment
  • Content delivery networks
  • Bundling content and connectivity
  • Zero-rating content
  • Carrier billing
  • Content promotion
  • Apple and EE in harmony
  • Value exchange and takeaways
  • Improving the customer experience
  • Making mobile data stretch further
  • Off-peak downloads, offline viewing
  • Data plan awareness for apps
  • Fine-grained control for consumers
  • Value exchange and takeaways
  • Extending and enhancing connectivity
  • Subsea cable consortiums
  • Free public Wi-Fi services
  • MVNO Project Fi – branded by Google, enabled by telcos
  • Value exchange and takeaways
  • Developing the networks of the future
  • Software-defined networks: Google and the CORD project
  • Opening up network hardware: Facebook’s Telecom Infra Project
  • Value exchange and takeaways
  • Delivering cloud computing to enterprises
  • Reselling cloud-based apps
  • Secure cloud computing – AWS and AT&T join forces
  • Value exchange and takeaways
  • Conclusions and Recommendations
  • Google is top of mind
  • Whose brand benefits?

Figures:

  • Figure 1: The business objectives differ somewhat by partnership strategy
  • Figure 2: Operators regard their customer base as their biggest asset
  • Figure 3: US Internet giants generate about 40% of mobile traffic in Asia-Pacific
  • Figure 4: Google and Facebook are now major players in mobile in Africa
  • Figure 5: Examples of telco-Internet platform partnerships in entertainment
  • Figure 6: BT Sport uses YouTube to promote its premium content
  • Figure 7: Apple Music appears to have helped EE’s performance
  • Figure 8: Amazon is challenging Apple and Spotify in the global music market
  • Figure 9: Examples of telco-Google co-operation around transparency
  • Figure 10: YouTube Smart Offline could alleviate peak pressure on networks
  • Figure 11: Google’s Triangle app gives consumers fine-grained control over apps
  • Figure 12: Examples of telco-Internet platform partnerships to deliver connectivity
  • Figure 13: Project Fi’s operator partners provide extensive 4G coverage
  • Figure 14: Both T-Mobile US and Sprint need to improve their financial returns
  • Figure 15: Examples of telco-Internet platform partnerships on network innovation
  • Figure 16: AWS has a big lead in the cloud computing market
  • Figure 17: Examples of telco-Internet platform partnerships in enterprise cloud
  • Figure 18: AT&T provides private and secure connectivity to public clouds
  • Figure 19: Amazon and Alphabet lead corporate America in R&D
  • Figure 20: Telcos need to be wary of bolstering already powerful brands
  • Figure 21: Balancing immediate value of partnerships against strategic implications
  • Figure 22: Different telcos should adopt different strategies