Tag: Orange

Are telcos smart enough to make money work?

Telco consumer financial services propositions

Telcos face a perplexing challenge in consumer markets. On the one hand, telcos’ standing with consumers has improved through the COVID-19 pandemic, and demand for connectivity is strong and continues to grow. On the other hand, most consumers are not spending more money with telcos because operators have yet to create compelling new propositions that they can charge more for. In the broadest sense, telcos need to (and can in our view) create more value for consumers and society more generally.

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As discussed in our previous research, we believe the world is now entering a “Coordination Age” in which multiple stakeholders will work together to maximize the potential of the planet’s natural and human resources. New technologies – 5G, analytics, AI, automation, cloud – are making it feasible to coordinate and optimise the allocation of resources in real-time. As providers of connectivity that generates vast amounts of relevant data, telcos can play an important role in enabling this coordination. Although some operators have found it difficult to expand beyond connectivity, the opportunity still exists and may actually be expanding.

In this report, we consider how telcos can support more efficient allocation of capital by playing in the financial services sector.  Financial services (banking) sits in a “sweet spot” for operators: economies of scale are available at a national level, connected technology can change the industry.

Financial Services in the Telecoms sweet spot

financial services

Source STL Partners

The financial services industry is undergoing major disruption brought about by a combination of digitisation and liberalisation – new legislation, such as the EU’s Payment Services Directive, is making it easier for new players to enter the banking market. And there is more disruption to come with the advent of digital currencies – China and the EU have both indicated that they will launch digital currencies, while the U.S. is mulling going down the same route.

A digital currency is intended to be a digital version of cash that is underpinned directly by the country’s central bank. Rather than owning notes or coins, you would own a deposit directly with the central bank. The idea is that a digital currency, in an increasingly cash-free society, would help ensure financial stability by enabling people to store at least some of their money with a trusted official platform, rather than a company or bank that might go bust. A digital currency could also make it easier to bring unbanked citizens (the majority of the world’s population) into the financial system, as central banks could issue digital currencies directly to individuals without them needing to have a commercial bank account. Telcos (and other online service providers) could help consumers to hold digital currency directly with a central bank.

Although the financial services industry has already experienced major upheaval, there is much more to come. “There’s no question that digital currencies and the underlying technology have the potential to drive the next wave in financial services,” Dan Schulman, the CEO of PayPal told investors in February 2021. “I think those technologies can help solve some of the fundamental problems of the system. The fact that there’s this huge prevalence and cost of cash, that there’s lack of access for so many parts of the population into the system, that there’s limited liquidity, there’s high friction in commerce and payments.”

In light of this ongoing disruption, this report reviews the efforts of various operators, such as Orange, Telefónica and Turkcell, to expand into consumer financial services, notably the provision of loans and insurance. A close analysis of their various initiatives offers pointers to the success criteria in this market, while also highlighting some of the potential pitfalls to avoid.

Table of contents

  • Executive Summary
  • Introduction
  • Potential business models
    • Who are you serving?
    • What are you doing for the people you serve?
    • M-Pesa – a springboard into an array of services
    • Docomo demonstrates what can be done
    • But the competition is fierce
  • Applying AI to lending and insurance
    • Analysing hundreds of data points
    • Upstart – one of the frontrunners in automated lending
    • Takeaways
  • From payments to financial portal
    • Takeaways
  • Turkcell goes broad and deep
    • Paycell has a foothold
    • Consumer finance takes a hit
    • Regulation moving in the right direction
    • Turkcell’s broader expansion plans
    • Takeaways
  • Telefónica targets quick loans
    • Growing competition
    • Elsewhere in Latin America
    • Takeaways
  • Momentum builds for Orange
    • The cost of Orange Bank
    • Takeaways
  • Conclusions and recommendations
  • Index

This report builds on earlier STL Partners research, including:

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Cloud gaming: What’s the telco play?

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Drivers for cloud gaming services

Although many people still think of PlayStation and Xbox when they think about gaming, the console market represents only a third of the global games market. From its arcade and console-based beginnings, the gaming industry has come a long way. Over the past 20 years, one of the most significant market trends has been growth of casual gamers. Whereas hardcore gamers are passionate about frequent play and will pay more to play premium games, casual gamers play to pass the time. With the rapid adoption of smartphones capable of supporting gaming applications over the past decade, the population of casual/occasional gamers has risen dramatically.

This trend has seen the advent of free-to-play business models for games, further expanding the industry’s reach. In our earlier report, STL estimated that 45% of the population in the U.S. are either casual gamers (between 2 and 5 hours a week) or occasional gamers (up to 2 hours a week). By contrast, we estimated that hardcore gamers (more than 15 hours a week) make up 5% of the U.S. population, while regular players (5 to 15 hours a week) account for a further 15% of the population.

The expansion in the number of players is driving interest in ‘cloud gaming’. Instead of games running on a console or PC, cloud gaming involves streaming games onto a device from remote servers. The actual game is stored and run on a remote compute with the results being live streamed to the player’s device. This has the important advantage of eliminating the need for players to purchase dedicated gaming hardware. Now, the quality of the internet connection becomes the most important contributor to the gaming experience. While this type of gaming is still in its infancy, and faces a number of challenges, many companies are now entering the cloud gaming fold in an effort to capitalise on the new opportunity.

5G can support cloud gaming traffic growth

Cloud gaming requires not just high bandwidth and low latency, but also a stable connection and consistent low latency (jitter). In theory, 5G promises to deliver stable ultra-low latency. In practice, an enormous amount of infrastructure investment will be required in order to enable a fully loaded 5G network to perform as well as end-to-end fibre. 5G networks operating in the lower frequency bands would likely buckle under the load if lots of gamers in a cell needed a continuous 25Mbps stream. While 5G in millimetre-wave spectrum would have more capacity, it would require small cells and other mechanisms to ensure indoor penetration, given the spectrum is short range and could be blocked by obstacles such as walls.

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A complicated ecosystem

As explained in our earlier report, Cloud gaming: New opportunities for telcos?, the cloud gaming ecosystem is beginning to take shape. This is being accelerated by the growing availability of fibre and high-speed broadband, which is now being augmented by 5G and, in some cases, edge data centres. Early movers in cloud gaming are offering a range of services, from gaming rigs, to game development platforms, cloud computing infrastructure, or an amalgamation of these.

One of the main attractions of cloud gaming is the potential hardware savings for gamers. High-end PC gaming can be an extremely expensive hobby: gaming PCs range from £500 for the very cheapest to over £5,000 for the very top end. They also require frequent hardware upgrades in order to meet the increasing processing demands of new gaming titles. With cloud gaming, you can access the latest graphics processing unit at a much lower cost.

By some estimates, cloud gaming could deliver a high-end gaming environment at a quarter of the cost of a traditional console-based approach, as it would eliminate the need for retailing, packaging and delivering hardware and software to consumers, while also tapping the economies of scale inherent in the cloud. However, in STL Partners’ view that is a best-case scenario and a 50% reduction in costs is probably more realistic.

STL Partners believes adoption of cloud gaming will be gradual and piecemeal for the next few years, as console gamers work their way through another generation of consoles and casual gamers are reluctant to commit to a monthly subscription. However, from 2022, adoption is likely to grow rapidly as cloud gaming propositions improve.

At this stage, it is not yet clear who will dominate the value chain, if anyone. Will the “hyperscalers” be successful in creating a ‘Netflix’ for games? Google is certainly trying to do this with its Stadia platform, which has yet to gain any real traction, due to both its limited games library and its perceived technological immaturity. The established players in the games industry, such as EA, Microsoft (Xbox) and Sony (PlayStation), have launched cloud gaming offerings, or are, at least, in the process of doing so. Some telcos, such as Deutsche Telekom and Sunrise, are developing their own cloud gaming services, while SK Telecom is partnering with Microsoft.

What telcos can learn from Shadow’s cloud gaming proposition

The rest of this report explores the business models being pursued by cloud gaming providers. Specifically, it looks at cloud gaming company Shadow and how it fits into the wider ecosystem, before evaluating how its distinct approach compares with that of the major players in online entertainment, such as Sony and Google. The second half of the report considers the implications for telcos.

Table of Contents

  • Executive Summary
  • Introduction
  • Cloud gaming: a complicated ecosystem
    • The battle of the business models
    • The economics of cloud gaming and pricing models
    • Content offering will trump price
    • Cloud gaming is well positioned for casual gamers
    • The future cloud gaming landscape
  • 5G and fixed wireless
  • The role of edge computing
  • How and where can telcos add value?
  • Conclusions

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Cashing in on the end of cash

Introduction

As the rapid expansion of the digital economy threatens to sweep away coins and notes, telcos could be one of the major players in the transition to a cashless society. In the emerging Coordination Age (see STL Partners report: Telco 2030: New purpose, strategy and business models for the Coordination Age), telcos are well placed to help consumers and companies interact and transact far more efficiently and effectively than they have in the past.

This report explores what the global shift away from cash means for telcos and their partners. It identifies the factors driving the transition from cash payments to electronic transactions, considering the perspective of governments, banks, merchants and consumers, before explaining why cash might cling on at the margins.

The report then outlines the progress mobile operators are making in payments and financial services, drawing on examples from Africa, Asia and Europe. It also considers some of the partnerships telcos are striking with Internet players to help overcome some of the obstacles curbing greater use of mobile payment services, before drawing conclusions and making recommendations.

This executive briefing builds on previous STL Partners reports including:

Calling time on cash

Despite the widespread adoption of the Internet and the subsequent rapid growth of online commerce, almost 90% of global retail1 still takes place at a physical point of sale in a store or at market stall. Although many traditional high streets and shopping malls are struggling, the value of point of sales transactions continues to grow, as an expanding middle class spends money at everything from coffee shops and restaurants to leisure centres and theme parks.

As you would expect, growth in developing markets tends to be markedly quicker than in developed. In India, point of sale transactions (using all payment mechanisms) are set to rise from US$893 billion in 2018 to US$1.36 trillion in value in 2022 (growth of 53%), according to leading payment processor Worldpay. Whereas in the U.S., point of sale transactions are set to grow from US$7.96 trillion in 2018 to US$10.33 trillion in value in 2022 (growth of 30%), according to Worldpay.

Even with the expansion of the digital economy, many transactions worldwide still involve the face-toface exchange of coins and/or notes. Cash is used to complete almost one third of payments (by value) at point of sale worldwide today, according to payments technology company Worldpay. But it predicts that figure will fall to 17% in 2022 – a dramatic change in just four years. Worldpay projects “that cash will be supplanted by debit cards as the leading point of sale payment method in 2019, falling to fourth place in 2022 behind debit cards, credit cards, and eWallets.”

These trends reflect the fact that using cash is expensive, cumbersome, inefficient and opaque. Cash may eventually become an anachronism. At least, that is what many large stakeholders in the public and private sectors are hoping. There are multiple drivers steering governments, banks, merchants, consumers and banks away from cash.

Why governments don’t like cash

Governments have several inter-related reasons for wanting to reduce the use of cash:

  • Tackle the black market: As cash is untraceable, it can facilitate crime, such as the trading of illegal or smuggled goods, and even terrorism. Governments periodically try and crack down on people who use large amounts of cash. In 2016, the government of India, for example, suddenly announced it was replacing 500 and 1,000 rupee notes (US$7.50 and US$15 respectively) with new notes in an effort to identify black marketers. People could exchange the old notes at banks, but those with large holdings had to account for the source of their cash. However, such measures only work up to a point: eradicating cash won’t eradicate crime. If necessary, criminals can always store and barter goods (e.g. drugs or guns), rather than hoarding cash.
  • Reduce corruption: In some countries, cash payments to and from the public sector are often vulnerable to being siphoned off by unscrupulous officials or other middlemen. Conversely, the digitisation of government benefit payments creates an electronic trail that reduces the risk of fraud and theft, and thereby ensures the money goes where it is intended. In 2010, when the Afghan National Police began using a mobile money service to pay salaries instead of cash, they discovered that 10 per cent of salaries were being paid to fictitious police officers, while some officers were not receiving their salaries in full, according to a report by CNN.
  • Greater transparency and less tax evasion: Cash-in-hand payments can result in lost tax revenue, as the recipients fail to declare their income or don’t pay VAT.
  • Reduce costs: If governments can distribute cash digitally, it can save both the public agency and the recipients both time and expenses: In Niger, converting a cash transfer programme to mobile money saved recipients over 20 hours, as they spent less time travelling and waiting for their transfers3.
  • Digital leadership: Some governments want to position their countries as digitally advanced and see the drive to get rid of cash as a means to digitise services and drive adoption of digital IDs, which are a key enabler of the digital vision.
  • Increase state control: Some authoritarian states are likely to see the digitisation of payments as an opportunity to enhance state power, or at least enhance security.

However, in many cases, governments have to distribute or accept cash because many of their citizens still lack bank accounts. More than 60 million unbanked adults globally still receive government transfers, wages or pensions in cash, while 230 million unbanked adults work in the private sector and get paid in cash only, according to the World Bank’s Global Findex Database Measuring Financial Inclusion and the Fintech Revolution 2017.

Banks and merchants find cash costly

But the biggest driver behind the decline of cash could simply be the costs of the underlying infrastructure and merchants’ growing reluctance to accept cash. For a small retailer, bar or coffee shop, cash consumes time – it needs to be counted and taken to the bank. It also poses a security risk, whereas digital payments automatically end up in the merchant’s bank account and are very unlikely to go missing.

Cash is also a burden for the financial services ecosystem, which has to make ATMs and bank branches available. In the U.K., the Access to Cash Review, a report published in March 2019, warned: “As we stand, we have a cash infrastructure which is fast becoming unsustainable, with largely fixed costs, but where income is declining fast. Britain’s cash infrastructure costs around £5 billion a year to run, paid for predominantly by the retail banks, and run mostly by commercial operators. Much of this cost is currently fixed, whether in physical cash sorting centres or ATMs. But as cash use declines, the economics of the current cash model are becoming seriously challenged.”

Consumers’ mixed feelings about cash

Although some consumers may want to use cash to avoid taxes and maintain privacy, there are several reasons why they too might favour digital payments. Every deposit, withdrawal, transfer or payment made digitally creates a recorded financial history. These transparent transaction records can help protect customers’ rights – they can help prove that they have paid for a specific product or service. Moreover, using digital payments, rather than cash, can help individuals build a credit history, which could make it easier to get a loan. Digital records should also help consumers to monitor and budget their spending, although some studies have found that some forms of digital payments, such as contactless payment cards, can result in consumers spending more than if they were solely reliant on cash.

In the developing world, where credit scores are scarce, merchants are turning to digital mechanisms to help consumers pay in instalments for appliances, such as TVs, radios, lighting, cooking stoves and solar water pumps (all of which can increase household and agricultural productivity). In Kenya, for example, SunCulture enables farmers to pay for solar-powered irrigation pumps in instalments via a mobile money service. As a result, they can improve their productivity and, ultimately, their incomes. Farmers who use SunCulture have reported an average 300% increase in crop yield per year, according to a study by the mobile trade group GSMA.

A vicious circle for cash

While Worldpay point of sale data show cash is in steady decline, there are good reasons to believe it may actually be under-estimating the speed at which other payment methods will take over. In many markets, cash is approaching a potentially decisive tipping point. With consumers ambivalent and governments, merchants and banks all favouring alternatives, cash is in the grip of a vicious circle:

  • The deregulation of the banking system is increasing competition and putting pressure on banks to cut costs and close branches.
  • Small businesses find that the closure of bank branches makes it more expensive and riskier to handle cash. In some cases, merchants stop accepting cash or give people incentives to pay digitally.
  • As fewer merchants accept cash, consumers become increasingly reliant on digital alternatives.
  • As people use cash less and less, they make fewer visits to ATMs and bank branches.
  • Banks continue to close ATMs and branches, making it increasingly hard for anyone to keep using cash. Once the cash infrastructure in a specific locality has gone, everyone living in that area really much has to go digital.

If this vicious circle kicks in, providers of mobile payment services need to be ready for a very sharp fall in the usage of cash. In practice, that will mean upgrading back-end systems so they can handle large numbers of simultaneous transactions, while also preparing for a fresh competitive onslaught from new entrants hungry for potentially valuable transaction data.

 

Table of contents

  • Executive Summary
  • Introduction
  • Calling time on cash
    • Why governments don’t like cash
    • Banks and merchants find cash costly
    • Consumers’ mixed feelings about cash
    • The rise of the electronic wallet
    • A vicious circle for cash
    • The convenience economy
    • Why cash might persist
  • Mobile operators’ financial services
    • M-Pesa makes mixed progress in Kenya
    • The importance of interoperability
    • Telcos as banks
  • Conversational commerce
  • Partnering with Internet players
    • Learning from China’s Internet platforms
    • Other partnerships between Internet players and telcos
  • Conclusions and recommendations

Telco innovation: Why it’s broken and how to fix it

Telcos have tried innovating in many verticals

Incumbent telecommunications providers have seen their margins fall as basic telecommunications services, both fixed and mobile, have been increasingly commoditised. The need to provide differentiated services to counteract this trend is widely recognised in the industry, yet despite considerable investment and many attempts, too often new services launched by operators have failed to deliver the anticipated results. Yet some, especially in mobile banking and related services, have proved successful. Why is this so?

This report focuses on product and service innovation for customers, rather than on innovation in sales, marketing, finance, operations or networks. It addresses the introduction of new and innovative services and not the repackaging of existing communications services, for example in new pricing and service bundles (see Figure 2).

It looks at examples from a range of services, covering most of the new types of services introduced by MNOs over the past decade. These include:

  • Messaging: RCS and its competitors
  • Mobile financial and insurance services: Orange Money / Orange Bank, Millicom/Tigo’s joint ventures
  • Health: O2 Telehealth, Telenor’s Tonic health service
  • Smart home: AT&T’s Digital Life, Deutsche Telekom’s Qivicon
  • Lifestyle: Turkcell’s range of apps and Vodacom’s Mezzanine

We have covered many of these individually in previous reports, looking at how they were developed and have evolved over time, and whether and why they are (or we expect them to be) successful.

This report seeks to identify the common factors that led to success or failure, in order to establish some best practices for telcos in innovation. While we recognise that there are often several causes of success and failure, in some cases a single failure can undo much good work.

Previous reports this one builds on include:

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Product development or true diversification: How ambitious should telcos be?

Historically, telcos have aimed to find new customers for existing telecoms services, where the their market is not yet saturated, or expanding geographically to achieve scale. However, most telecoms markets are now nearly saturated – at least in the areas that telcos can profitably reach – so true service innovation, corresponding to the right hand side on the figure below, is now a crucial component for long term revenue growth.

The seven telco innovations discussed in this report are shown on the figure below. It is worth noting the progression Orange has made in building on its experience with its mobile money service to providing full banking services. This is highlighted in the diagram by the arrow, and is discussed more fully in the body of this report.

Most telcos innovation falls in the product development category on the Ansoff matrix

Telco innovations plotted on the Ansoff matrix

Source: STL Partners. For more on market development opportunity, see STL Partners report Making big beautiful: Multinational telcos need the telco cloud

In theory, one of the most effective ways of maximising the chances of success, and achieving the scale required to make a significant impact on revenues and profitability, is for operators to select services that target a large part of their existing customer base.

However, our analysis of the telco innovations in this report shows that there is actually little correlation between the distance from telcos’ core customer base and level of success. This because by tying new products and services too closely to their existing customer bases, telcos are actually limiting their ability to scale. While this approach is intended to help them compete more effectively against their peers, by increasing loyalty for core telecoms services, in reality, any telco-driven product development innovation is likely to compete with network agnostic service providers. So while it may make sense to offer something only to existing customers at the start, to truly scale telcos need to reach a wider market.

Orange is a good example of this transition. While its mobile money services in Africa remain tied to its telecoms customer base, its move into full-fledge banking in France is separate from telecoms services. As it rolls out full banking services across its footprint, this separation is likely to become more entrenched.

Many of the examples discussed in the main body of the report, including AT&T’s Digital Life, Orange Money and O2’s Telehealth venture were set up as separate businesses, which allowed their initial development to progress well. But this was not enough on their own to make them successful.

How successful have telcos been?

Comparing telcos’ investments into service innovations shows that, too often, they have made bets on areas that seem like natural opportunities for new services, but failed to gain traction because they didn’t do a rigorous enough assessment of the conditions for success.

To succeed in innovation, telcos must evaluate proposed new services or products much more painstakingly across three areas:

  1. User needs and requirements: that the product or service meets a real user need. This breaks down into two points:
    • The product or servicemust be easy to use and fit into users’ lifestyles.
    • And at the right price point. Most consumer products need a free tier to encourage customers to try and engage before paying (if ever). In some cases, the end user might not be the payer, so if that is the case then telcos need to identify the payer and ensure the product is relevant and valuable for them, too.
  2. Market structure and characteristics: clear vision of where the ROI is coming from. There are two main options for ROI – increased customer loyalty and new revenue.
    • For loyalty, telcos need a clear means of measuring whether the product or service is improving retention.
    • If telcos are seeking to build new revenue, they need to be realistic about how long it will take to achieve profitability and the size of the opportunity. Too often, telcos give up because they deem a new venture not valuable enough compared with the core business..
  3. Business structure: deciding on whether to develop something in house, to set up a joint venture, or acquire, and what the relationship is with the core business. The further away a new product or service is from the core business, the more independence it needs to develop and grow.

In this report, we compare the approaches of seven telco innovations, drawing on in-depth analysis from previous STL Partners reports, summarised in the table below.

Strategy is more important that degree of difficult for successful innovation

Assessment of quality of strategy and execution for telco innovationsSource: STL Partners

Our analysis shows that the difficulty of the innovation, i.e. whether it is product development or diversification into a new vertical, is less important to success than doing the difficult strategy and planning work outlined above.

For instance, while RCS is very closely tied to telcos’ existing customers and services, the necessary cooperation between telcos to bring it to market in a way that is valuable to consumers and potential enterprise customers was unrealistic from the start. By constrast, Tonic’s health insurance proposition is very different from Telenor’s core telecoms services, but Tonic’s clear vision and strategy, and ability to adapt to customer needs, have underpinned its early success in Bangladesh.

Read the full report to see a detailed assessment of each innovation across the three categories.

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Why fibre is on fire again

Introduction

Fibre to the home is growing at a near-explosive rate

Every company faces the problems of mature markets, disappointing revenues and tough decisions on investment. Everyone agrees that fibre delivers the best network experience, but until recently most companies rejected fibre as too costly.

Now, 15 of the world’s largest phone companies have decided fibre to the home is a solution. Why are so many now investing so heavily?

Here are some highlight statistics:

  • On 26th July 2018, AT&T announced it will pass 5 million locations with fibre to the home in the next 12 months, after reaching 3 million new locations in the last year.[1] Fibre is now a proven money-maker for the US giant, bringing new customers every quarter.
  • Telefónica Spain has passed 20 million premises – over 70% of the addressable population – and continues at 2 million a year.
  • Telefónica Brazil is going from 7 million in 2018 to 10 million in 2020.
  • China’s three giants have 344 million locations connected.[2]
  • Worldwide FTTH connections grew 23% between Q1 2017 and Q1 2018.[3]
  • In June 2018, China Mobile added 4.63 million broadband customers, nearly all FTTH.[4]
  • European FTTH growth in 2017 was 20%.[5]
  • In India, Mukesh Ambani intends to connect 50 million homes at Reliance Jio.[6]


Even the most reluctant carriers are now building, including Deutsche Telekom and British Telecom. In 2015, BT Openreach CTO Peter Bell said FTTH was “impossible” for Britain because it was too expensive.[7] Now, BT is hiring 3,500 engineers to connect 3 million premises, with 10 million more homes under consideration.[8]

Credit Suisse believes that for an incumbent, “The cost of building fibre is less than the cost of not building fibre.”

Contents:

  • Executive Summary
  • Introduction
  • Fibre to the home is growing at a near-explosive rate
  • Why the change?
  • Strategies of leading companies
  • Frontrunners
  • Moving toward rapid growth
  • Relative newcomer
  • The newly converted
  • Alternate carriers
  • Naysayers
  • U.S. regionals: CenturyLink, Frontier and Windstream
  • The Asian pioneers
  • Two technologies to consider
  • Ten-gigabit equipment
  • G.fast
  • The hard question: How many will decide to go wireless only?

Figures:

  • Figure 1: Paris area fibre coverage – Orange has covered most of the capital
  • Figure 2: European fibre growth
  • Figure 3: Top five European incumbents, stock price July 2016 – July 2018
  • Figure 4: DT CEO Tim Höttges and Bavarian Prime Minister Dr. Markus Söder announce a deal to fibre nearly all of Bavaria, part financed by the government

[1] https://www.fastnet.news/index.php/11-fib/715-at-t-fiber-run-rate-going-from-3m-to-5m-year

[2] https://www.fastnet.news/index.php/8-fnn/713-china-1-1b-4g-400m-broadband-328m-fibre-home-rapid-growth

[3] http://point-topic.com/free-analysis/world-broadband-statistics-q1-2018/

[4] https://www.chinamobileltd.com/en/ir/operation_m.php

[5] http://www.ftthcouncil.eu/documents/PressReleases/2018/PR%20Market%20Panorama%20-%2015-02-2018-%20FINAL.pdf

[6] https://www.fastnet.news/index.php/11-fib/703-india-unreal-jio-wants-50m-ftth-in-1100-cities

[7] G.fast Summit May 2015

[8] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/feb/01/bt-openreach-hire-3000-engineers-drive-to-fill-broadband-not-spots

Consumer IoT: How telcos can create new value

Introduction: Trust is a must for consumer IoT – but is consumer IoT a must for telcos?

Lack of trust is a major barrier to mass-market consumer IoT adoption

There was an expectation two to three years ago that take-up of consumer Internet of Things (IoT) services was set to accelerate, and that we would soon witness the success of mass market consumer IoT offers in areas such as energy management (linked to roll-outs of smart metering), home automation and security, and health and wellness applications (linked to wearables such as smart watches, fitness trackers and medical condition sensors). It was also widely expected that telcos would play a leading role in this market.

Although growth has occurred in these product areas, it has generally been below expectations. Everett M. Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory shows how the different stages of public acceptance a new product goes through, with successive groups of consumers adopting the new technology (shown in blue), so its market share (yellow) eventually reaches saturation level. Looking at this theory, STL believes that consumer IoT is still in the “early adopter” stage.

Figure 1: Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory

Source: Rogers, E. (1962) Diffusion of innovations, image from Wikipedia

In addition to this, telcos have tended to play a peripheral part in the market thus far, limited largely to providing the wireless and broadband connectivity supporting third-party products developed by players focused on adjacent vertical markets. Already the focus of telcos’ IoT strategies seems to have been redirected to enterprise and industrial IoT applications, along with the rapidly maturing connected car and smart cities markets, judging from the wave of new product and partnership announcements in these areas at recent trade shows, such as this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC). Despite this, we believe that consumer IoT could still represent a large addressable market for telcos, based on data presented in chapter 3.

There are many reasons for the levelling of the expected consumer IoT growth curve, some of which we will explore in this report. In terms of definitions, we are limiting the term ‘consumer IoT’ to ‘consumer-centric’ applications and services, whether these are deployed primarily in the home (such as home automation and security) or on the person (e.g. wearables, and health and wellness). We will not directly discuss connected car / autonomous vehicle and smart cities applications, even though they relate to consumer services and experiences, as the dynamics of these services and their technological challenges are quite distinct. In addition, we will only tangentially discuss healthcare IoT, as it is far from clear what sort of ‘consumer’ business model will be established in this sector (as opposed to a public service model); although it is likely that remote health and social care will play an increasingly central role in a prospective ‘second wave’ of consumer IoT services, based on trustworthy processing of intimate personal data to enable really useful services.

In addition, we make a distinction between ‘connected’ devices and homes, on the one hand, and ‘smart’ devices / homes and IoT services, on the other. A home is not smart, nor an IoT service present, until the connected devices or ‘things’ involved, and the data they generate, are integrated as part of an app that the user controls. As shown in Figure 2, in the existing IoT business model, this involves delivery of the data from multiple devices and sensors to a cloud-based service, enabling collection, aggregation and analysis of the data, and remote and automated performance of actions on those devices based on the analysis and on the user’s preferences.

Contents:

  • Executive Summary: Trust is king
  • Introduction: Trust is a must for consumer IoT – but is consumer IoT a must for telcos?
  • Lack of trust is a major barrier to mass-market consumer IoT adoption
  • Building trust with customers must be at the forefront of telcos’ consumer IoT offer and brand
  • Consumer IoT 1.0: opportunities and threats for telcos; telco strengths and weaknesses
  • Opportunities: The addressable market for telcos is potentially huge
  • Threats: do consumers buy it?
  • Established telco strengths can help offset the risks
  • Weaknesses: IoT exemplifies the challenges of digital innovation in general
  • Conclusion: consumer IoT is a huge challenge but also a huge opportunity that plays into telcos’ strengths
  • Deutsche Telekom’s consumer IoT platform and services
  • Deutsche Telekom and the Qivicon platform
  • Efforts to address the data security and privacy issues of consumer IoT 1.0
  • Avast: telcos can play a role as part of a cross-industry approach
  • Orange: transparency over use of data is key
  • Atomite: consumer consent and rewards for sharing data with third parties
  • Telefónica’s AURA: cognitive intelligence but an immature business model
  • Consumer IoT 2.0: A move to a (data) sharing economy
  • GDPR: A change in the rules that looks set to change business models
  • Databox: “privacy-aware data analytics platform”
  • IoT and the personal data economy: putting ‘me’ at the centre of my internet of things
  • Conclusion: Telcos need to be in the consumer IoT 1.0 game to win in consumer IoT 2.0
  • A massive potential market, with a large slice of the pie available to telcos…
  • … but do the risks outweigh the potential benefits?
  • Telcos need to play the consumer IoT 1.0 game to reach consumer IoT 2.0

Figures:

  • Figure 1: Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory
  • Figure 2: Consumer IoT 1.0
  • Figure 3: Consumer concerns about connected devices
  • Figure 4: Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for telcos in consumer IoT
  • Figure 5: Connected home installed base and penetration EU and North America, 2013–19
  • Figure 6: Companies most trusted with personal data
  • Figure 7: The Qivicon consumer IoT platform
  • Figure 8: Orange ‘Trust Badge’ – what personal and usage data is collected, and why
  • Figure 9: Key functionality of the Meeco personal data portal

MobiNEX: The Mobile Network Experience Index, H1 2016

Executive Summary

In response to customers’ growing usage of mobile data and applications, in April 2016 STL Partners developed MobiNEX: The Mobile Network Experience Index, which ranks mobile network operators by key measures relating to customer experience. To do this, we benchmark mobile operators’ network speed and reliability, allowing individual operators to see how they are performing in relation to the competition in an objective and quantitative manner.

Operators are assigned an individual MobiNEX score out of 100 based on their performance across four measures that STL Partners believes to be core drivers of customer app experience: download speed, average latency, error rate and latency consistency (the proportion of app requests that take longer than 500ms to fulfil).

Our partner Apteligent has provided us with the raw data for three out of the four measures, based on billions of requests made from tens of thousands of applications used by hundreds of millions of users in H1 2016. While our April report focused on the top three or four operators in just seven Western markets, this report covers 80 operators drawn from 25 markets spread across the globe in the first six months of this year.

The top ten operators were from Japan, France, the UK and Canada:

  • Softbank JP scores highest on the MobiNEX for H1 2016, with high scores across all measures and a total score of 85 out of 100.
  • Close behind are Bouygues FR (80) and Free FR (79), which came first and second respectively in the Q4 2015 rankings. Both achieve high scores for error rate, latency consistency and average latency, but are slightly let down by download speed.
  • The top six is completed by NTT DoCoMo JP (78), Orange FR (75) and au (KDDI) JP (71).
  • Slightly behind are Vodafone UK (65), EE UK (64), SFR FR (63), O2 UK (62) and Rogers CA (62). Except in the case of Rogers, who score similarly on all measures, these operators are let down by substantially worse download speeds.

The bottom ten operators all score a total of 16 or lower out of 100, suggesting a materially worse customer app experience.

  • Trailing the pack with scores of 1 or 2 across all four measures were Etisalat EG (4), Vodafone EG (4), Smart PH (5) and Globe PH (5).
  • Beeline RU (11) and Malaysian operators U Mobile MY (9) and Digi MY (9) also fare poorly, but benefit from slightly higher latency consistency scores. Slightly better overall, but still achieving minimum scores of 1 for download speed and average latency, are Maxis MY (14) and MTN ZA (12).

Overall, the extreme difference between the top and bottom of the table highlights a vast inequality in network quality customer experience across the planet. Customer app experience depends to a large degree on where one lives. However, our analysis shows that while economic prosperity does in general lead to a more advanced mobile experience as you might expect, it does not guarantee it. Norway, Sweden, Singapore and the US market are examples of high income countries with lower MobiNEX scores than might be expected against the global picture. STL Partners will do further analysis to uncover more on the drivers of differentiation between markets and players within them.

 

MobiNEX H1 2016 – included markets

MobiNEX H1 2016 – operator scores

 Source: Apteligent, OpenSignal, STL Partners analysis

 

  • About MobiNEX
  • Changes for H1 2016
  • MobiNEX H1 2016: results
  • The winners: top ten operators
  • The losers: bottom ten operators
  • The surprises: operators where you wouldn’t expect them
  • MobiNEX by market
  • MobiNEX H1 2016: segmentation
  • MobiNEX H1 2016: Raw data
  • Error rate
  • Latency consistency
  • Download speed
  • Average latency
  • Appendix 1: Methodology and source data
  • Latency, latency consistency and error rate: Apteligent
  • Download speed: OpenSignal
  • Converting raw data into MobiNEX scores
  • Setting the benchmarks
  • Why measure customer experience through app performance?
  • Appendix 2: Country profiles
  • Country profile: Australia
  • Country profile: Brazil
  • Country profile: Canada
  • Country profile: China
  • Country profile: Colombia
  • Country profile: Egypt
  • Country profile: France
  • Country profile: Germany
  • Country profile: Italy
  • Country profile: Japan
  • Country profile: Malaysia
  • Country profile: Mexico
  • Country profile: New Zealand
  • Country profile: Norway
  • Country profile: Philippines
  • Country profile: Russia
  • Country profile: Saudi Arabia
  • Country profile: Singapore
  • Country profile: South Africa
  • Country profile: Spain
  • Country profile: United Arab Emirates
  • Country profile: United Kingdom
  • Country profile: United States
  • Country profile: Vietnam

 

  • Figure 1: MobiNEX scoring breakdown, benchmarks and raw data used
  • Figure 2: MobiNEX H1 2016 – included markets
  • Figure 3: MobiNEX H1 2016 – operator scores breakdown (top half)
  • Figure 4: MobiNEX H1 2016 – operator scores breakdown (bottom half)
  • Figure 5: MobiNEX H1 2016 – average scores by country
  • Figure 6: MobiNEX segmentation dimensions
  • Figure 7: MobiNEX segmentation – network speed vs reliability
  • Figure 8: MobiNEX segmentation – network speed vs reliability – average by market
  • Figure 9: MobiNEX vs GDP per capita – H1 2016
  • Figure 10: MobiNEX vs smartphone penetration – H1 2016
  • Figure 11: Error rate per 10,000 requests, H1 2016 – average by country
  • Figure 12: Error rate per 10,000 requests, H1 2016 (top half)
  • Figure 13: Error rate per 10,000 requests, H1 2016 (bottom half)
  • Figure 14: Requests with total roundtrip latency > 500ms (%), H1 2016 – average by country
  • Figure 15: Requests with total roundtrip latency > 500ms (%), H1 2016 (top half)
  • Figure 16: Requests with total roundtrip latency > 500ms (%), H1 2016 (bottom half)
  • Figure 17: Average weighted download speed (Mbps), H1 2016 – average by country
  • Figure 18: Average weighted download speed (Mbps), H1 2016 (top half)
  • Figure 19: Average weighted download speed (Mbps), H1 2016 (bottom half)
  • Figure 20: Average total roundtrip latency (ms), H1 2016 – average by country
  • Figure 21: Average total roundtrip latency (ms), H1 2016 (top half)
  • Figure 22: Average total roundtrip latency (ms), H1 2016 (bottom half)
  • Figure 23: Benchmarks and raw data used

SDN / NFV: Early Telco Leaders in the Enterprise Market

Introduction

This report builds on a number of previous analyses of the progress and impact of SDN (Software-Defined Networking) and NFV (Network Functions Virtualization), both in the enterprise market and in telecoms more generally. In particular, this briefing aims to explore in more detail the market potential and dynamics of two new SDN / NFV-based enterprise services that were discussed as part of an analysis of revenue opportunities presented by ‘telco cloud’ services.

These two services are ‘Network as a Service’ (NaaS) and ‘enterprise virtual CPE’ (vCPE). ‘Network as a Service’ refers to any service that enables enterprise customers to directly configure the parameters of their corporate network, including via a user-friendly portal or APIs. This particularly involves the facility to scale up or down the bandwidth available on network links – either on a near-real-time or scheduled basis – and to establish new network connections on demand, e.g. between business sites and / or data centers. Examples of NaaS include AT&T’s Network On Demand portfolio and Telstra’s PEN service, both of which are discussed further below.

‘Enterprise virtual CPE’, as the name suggests, involves virtualizing dedicated networking equipment sited traditionally at the enterprise premises, so as to offer equivalent functionality in the form of virtual network appliances in the cloud, delivered over COTS hardware. Virtual network functions (VNFs) offered in this form typically include routing, firewalls, VPN, WAN optimization, and others; and the benefit to telcos of offering vCPE is that it provides a platform to easily cross- and upsell additional functionality, particularly in the areas of application and network performance and security.

The abbreviation ‘vCPE’ is also used for consumer virtual CPE, which involves replacing complicated routers, TV set-top boxes and gateway equipment used in the home with simplified devices running equivalent functions from the cloud. For the purposes of this report, when we use the term ‘vCPE’, we refer to the enterprise version of the term, unless otherwise stated.

The reason why this report focuses on NaaS and vCPE is that more commercial services of these types have been launched or are planned than is the case with any other SDN / NFV-dependent enterprise service. Consequently, the business models are becoming more evident, and it is possible to make an assessment of the revenue potential of these services.

Our briefing ‘New Revenue Growth from Telco Cloud’ (published in April 2016) modeled the potential impact of SDN / NFV-based services on the revenues of a large illustrative telco with a significant presence in both fixed and mobile, and enterprise and consumer, segments in a developed market similar to the UK. This concluded that such a telco introducing all of the SDN / NFV services that are expected to become commercially mature over the period 2017 to 2021 could expect to generate a monthly revenue uplift of some X% (actual figures available in full report) by the end of 2021 compared with the base case of failing to launch any such service.

Including only revenues directly attributable to the new services (as opposed to ‘core revenues’ – e.g. from traditional voice and data services – that are boosted by reduced churn and net customer additions deriving from the new services), vCPE and NaaS represent the two largest sources of new revenue: Y and Z percentage points respectively out of the total X% net revenue increase deriving from SDN / NFV, as illustrated in Figure 1 (Figure not shown – actual figures available in full report).

Figure 1: Telco X – Net new revenue by service category (Dec 2021)

Figure not shown – available in full report

Source: STL Partners analysis

In terms of NaaS and vCPE specifically, the model assumes that Telco X will begin to roll out these services commercially in January and February 2017 respectively. This is a realistic timetable for some in our view, as several commercial NaaS and vCPE offerings have already been launched, and future launches have been announced, by telcos across North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.

In the rest of this briefing, we will:

  • present the main current and planned NaaS and vCPE services
  • analyze the market opportunities and competitive threats they are responding to
  • analyze in more detail the different types and combinations of NaaS and vCPE offerings, and their business models
  • assess these services’ potential to grow telco revenues and market share
  • and review how these offerings fit within operators’ overall virtualization journeys.

We will conclude with an overall assessment of the prospects for NaaS and vCPE: the opportunities, and also the risks of inaction.

  • Executive Summary
  • Introduction
  • Current and planned NaaS and vCPE products
  • Opportunities and threats addressed by NaaS and vCPE
  • NaaS and vCPE: emerging offers and business models
  • Revenue growth potential of NaaS and vCPE
  • Relationship between SDN / NFV deployment strategy and operator type
  • Conclusion: NaaS and vCPE – a short-term window of opportunity to a long-term virtual future

 

  • Figure 1: Telco X – Net new revenue by service category (Dec 2021)
  • Figure 2: Leading current and planned commercial NaaS and vCPE services
  • Figure 3: Cumulative NaaS and vCPE launches, 2013-16
  • Figure 4: Verizon SD-WAN as part of Virtual Network Services vCPE offering
  • Figure 5: COLT’s cloud-native VPN and vCPE
  • Figure 6: Evolution of vCPE delivery modes
  • Figure 7: SD-WAN-like NaaS versus SD-WAN
  • Figure 8: Base case shows declining revenues
  • Figure 9: Telco X – Telco Cloud services increase monthly revenues by X% on the base case by Dec 2021
  • Figure 10: NaaS and vCPE deployments by operator type and overall SDN / NFV strategy
  • Figure 11: Progression from more to less hybrid deployment of NaaS and vCPE across the telco WAN

Innovation Leaders: A Surprisingly Successful Telco API Programme

Introduction

The value of APIs

Application programming interfaces (APIs) are a central part of the mobile and cloud-based app economy. On the web, APIs serve to connect back-end and front-end applications (and their data) to one another. While often treated as a technical topic, APIs also have tremendous economic value. This was illustrated very recently when Oracle sued Google for copyright infringement over the use of Oracle-owned Java APIs during the development of Google’s Android operating system. Even though Google won the case, Oracle’s quest for around $9 billion showed the huge potential value associated with widely-adopted APIs.

The API challenge facing telcos…

For telcos, APIs represent an opportunity to monetise their unique network and IT assets by making them available to third-parties. This is particularly important in the context of declining ‘core’ revenues caused by cloud and content providers bypassing telco services. This so-called “over the top” (OTT) threat forces telcos to both partner with third-parties as well as create their own competing offerings in order to dampen the decline in revenues and profits. With mobile app ecosystems maturing and, increasingly, extending beyond smartphones into wearables, cars, TVs, virtual reality, productivity devices and so forth, telcos need to embrace these developments to avoid being a ‘plain vanilla’ connectivity provider – a low-margin low-growth business.

However, thriving in this co-opetitive environment is challenging for telcos because major digital players such as Google, Amazon, Netflix and Baidu, and a raft of smaller developers have an operating model and culture of agility and fast innovation. Telcos need to become easier to collaborate with and a systematic approach to API management and API exposure should be central to any telco partnership strategy and wider ‘transformation programme’.

…and Dialog’s best-practice approach

In this report, we will analyse how Dialog, Sri Lanka’s largest operator, has adopted a two-pronged API implementation strategy. Dialog has systematically exposed APIs:

  1. Externally in order to monetise in partnership with third-parties;
  2. Internally in order to foster agile service creation and reduce operational costs.

STL Partners believes that this two-pronged strategy has been instrumental in Dialog’s API success and that other operators should explore a similar strategy when seeking to launch or expand their API activities.

Dialog Axiata has steadily increased the number of API calls (indexed)

Source: Dialog Axiata

In this report, we will first cover the core lessons that can be drawn from Dialog’s approach and success and then we will outline in detail how Dialog’s Group CIO and Axiata Digital’s CTO, Anthony Rodrigo, and his team implemented APIs within the company and, subsequently, the wider Axiata Group.

 

  • Executive summary
  • Introduction
  • The value of APIs
  • The API challenge facing telcos…
  • …and Dialog’s best-practice approach
  • 5 key ‘telco API programme’ lessons
  • Background: What are APIs and why are they relevant to telcos?
  • API basics
  • API growth
  • The telecoms industry’s API track record is underwhelming
  • The Dialog API Programme (DAP)
  • Overview
  • Ideamart: A flexible approach to long-tail developer engagement
  • Axiata MIFE – building a multipurpose API platform
  • Drinking your own champagne : Dialog’s use of APIs internally
  • Expanding MIFE across Axiata opcos and beyond
  • Conclusion and outlook

 

  • Figure 1: APIs link backend infrastructure with applications
  • Figure 2: The explosive growth of open APIs
  • Figure 3: How a REST API works its magic
  • Figure 4: DAP service layers
  • Figure 5: Five APIs are available for Idea Pro apps
  • Figure 6: Idea Apps – pre-configured API templates
  • Figure 7: Ideadroid/Apptizer allows restaurants to specify food items they want to offer through the app
  • Figure 8: Ideamart’s developer engagement stats compare favourably to AT&T, Orange, and Vodafone
  • Figure 9: Steady increase in the number of API calls (indexed)
  • Figure 10: Dialog Allapps on Android
  • Figure 11: Ideabiz API platform for enterprise third-parties
  • Figure 12: Dialog Selfcare app user interface
  • Figure 13: Dialog Selfcare app functions – share in total number of hits
  • Figure 14: Apple App Store – Dialog Selfcare app ratings
  • Figure 15: Google Play Store – Dialog Selfcare app ratings
  • Figure 16: MIFE enables the creation of a variety of digital services – both internally and externally

MobiNEX: The Mobile Network Experience Index, Q4 2015

Executive Summary

In response to customers’ growing usage of mobile data and applications, STL Partners has developed MobiNEX: The Mobile Network Customer Experience Index, which benchmarks mobile operators’ network speed and reliability by measuring the consumer app experience, and allows individual players to see how they are performing in relation to competition in an objective and quantitative manner.

We assign operators an individual MobiNEX score based on their performance across four measures that are core drivers of customer app experience: download speed; average latency; error rate; latency consistency (the percentage of app requests that take longer than 500ms to fulfil). Apteligent has provided us with the raw data for three out of four of the measures based on billions of requests made from tens of thousands of applications used by hundreds of millions of users in Q4 2015. We plan to expand the index to cover other operators and to track performance over time with twice-yearly updates.

Encouragingly, MobiNEX scores are positively correlated with customer satisfaction in the UK and the US suggesting that a better mobile app experience contributes to customer satisfaction.

The top five performers across twenty-seven operators in seven countries in Europe and North America (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK, US) were all from France and the UK suggesting a high degree of competition in these markets as operators strive to improve relative to peers:

  • Bouygues Telecom in France scores highest on the MobiNEX for Q4 2015 with consistently high scores across all four measures and a total score of 76 out of 100.
  • It is closely followed by two other French operators. Free, the late entrant to the market, which started operations in 2012, scores 73. Orange, the former national incumbent, is slightly let down by the number of app errors experienced by users but achieves a healthy overall score of 70.
  • The top five is completed by two UK operators: EE (65) and O2 (61) with similar scores to the three French operators for everything except download speed which was substantially worse.

The bottom five operators have scores suggesting a materially worse customer app experience and we suggest that management focuses on improvements across all four measures to strengthen their customer relationships and competitive position. This applies particularly to:

  • E-Plus in Germany (now part of Telefónica’s O2 network but identified separately by Apteligent).
  • Wind in Italy, which is particularly let down by latency consistency and download speed.
  • Telefónica’s Movistar, the Spanish market share leader.
  • Sprint in the US with middle-ranking average latency and latency consistency but, like other US operators, poor scores on error rate and download speed.
  • 3 Italy, principally a result of its low latency consistency score.

Surprisingly, given the extensive deployment of 4G networks there, the US operators perform poorly and are providing an underwhelming customer app experience:

  • The best-performing US operator, T-Mobile, scores only 45 – a full 31 points below Bouygues Telecom and 4 points below the median operator.
  • All the US operators perform very poorly on error rate and, although 74% of app requests in the US were made on LTE in Q4 2015, no US player scores highly on download speed.

MobiNEX scores – Q4 2015

 Source: Apteligent, OpenSignal, STL Partners analysis

MobiNEX vs Customer Satisfaction

Source: ACSI, NCSI-UK, STL Partners

 

  • Introduction
  • Mobile app performance is dependent on more than network speed
  • App performance as a measure of customer experience
  • MobiNEX: The Mobile Network Experience Index
  • Methodology and key terms
  • MobiNEX Q4 2015 Results: Top 5, bottom 5, surprises
  • MobiNEX is correlated with customer satisfaction
  • Segmenting operators by network customer experience
  • Error rate
  • Quantitative analysis
  • Key findings
  • Latency consistency: Requests with latency over 500ms
  • Quantitative analysis
  • Key findings
  • Download speed
  • Quantitative analysis
  • Key findings
  • Average latency
  • Quantitative analysis
  • Key findings
  • Appendix: Source data and methodology
  • STL Partners and Telco 2.0: Change the Game
  • About Apteligent

 

  • MobiNEX scores – Q4 2015
  • MobiNEX vs Customer Satisfaction
  • Figure 1: MobiNEX – scoring methodology
  • Figure 2: MobiNEX scores – Q4 2015
  • Figure 3: Customer Satisfaction vs MobiNEX, 2015
  • Figure 4: MobiNEX operator segmentation – network speed vs network reliability
  • Figure 5: MobiNEX operator segmentation – with total scores
  • Figure 6: Major Western markets – error rate per 10,000 requests
  • Figure 7: Major Western markets – average error rate per 10,000 requests
  • Figure 8: Major Western operators – percentage of requests with total roundtrip latency greater than 500ms
  • Figure 9: Major Western markets – average percentage of requests with total roundtrip latency greater than 500ms
  • Figure 10: Major Western operators – average weighted download speed across 3G and 4G networks (Mbps)
  • Figure 11: Major European markets – average weighted download speed (Mbps)
  • Figure 12: Major Western markets – percentage of requests made on 3G and LTE
  • Figure 13: Download speed vs Percentage of LTE requests
  • Figure 14: Major Western operators – average total roundtrip latency (ms)
  • Figure 15: Major Western markets – average total roundtrip latency (ms)
  • Figure 16: MobiNEX benchmarks

Problem: Telecoms technology inhibits operator business model change (Part 1)

Introduction

Everyone loves to moan about telcos

‘I just can’t seem to get anything done, it is like running through treacle.’

‘We gave up trying to partner with operators – they are too slow.’

‘Why are telcos unable to make the most basic improvements in their service offerings?’

‘They are called operators for a reason: they operate networks. But they can’t innovate and don’t know the first thing about marketing or customer service.’

Anyone within the telecoms industry will have heard these or similar expressions of dissatisfaction from colleagues, partners and customers.  It seems that despite providing the connectivity and communications services that have truly changed the world in the last 20 years, operators are unloved.  Everyone, and I think we are all guilty of this, feels that operators could do so much better.  There is a feeling that these huge organisations are almost wilfully seeking to be slow and inflexible – as if there is malice in the way they do business.

But the telecoms industry employs millions of people globally. It pays quite well and so attracts talent. Many, for example, have already enjoyed success in other industries. But nobody has yet, it seems, been able to make a telco, let alone the industry, fast, agile, and innovative.

Why not?

A structural problem

In this report, we argue that nobody is at fault for the perceived woes of telecoms operators.  Indeed, the difficulty the industry is facing in changing its business model is a result of financial and operational processes that have been adopted and refined over years in response to investor requirements and regulation.  In turn, investors and regulators have created such requirements as a result of technological constraints that have applied, even with ongoing improvements, to fixed and mobile telecommunications for decades. In essence, operators are constrained by the very structures that were put in place to ensure their success.

So should we give up?

If the limitations of telecoms operators is structural then it is easy to assume that change and development is impossible.  Certainly sceptics have plenty of empirical evidence for this view.  But as we outline in this report and will cover in more detail in a follow up to be published in early February 2016 (Answer: How 5G + Cloud + NFV can create the ‘agile telco’), changes in technology should have a profound impact on telecoms operators ability to become more flexible and innovative and so thrive in the fast-paced digital world.

Customer satisfaction is proving elusive in mature markets

Telecoms operators perform materially worst on customer service than other players in the US and UK

Improving customer experience has become something of a mantra within telecoms in the last few years. Many operators use Net Promoter Scores (NPS) as a way of measuring their performance, and the concept of ‘putting the customer first’ has gained in popularity as the industry has matured and new customers have become harder to find. Yet customer satisfaction remains low.

The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) publishes annual figures for customer satisfaction based on extensive consumer surveys. Telecommunications companies consistently come out towards the bottom of the range (scoring 65-70 out of 100). By contrasts internet and content players such as Amazon, Google, Apple and Netflix have much more satisfied customers and score 80+ – see Figure 1.

Figure 1: Customers are generally dissatisfied with telecoms companies

 

Source: American Customer Satisfaction index (http://www.theacsi.org/the-american-customer-satisfaction-index); STL Partners analysis

The story in the UK is similar.  The UK Customer Satisfaction Index, using a similar methodology to its US counterpart, places the Telecommunications and Media industry as the second-worst performer across 13 industry sectors scoring 71.7 in 2015 compared to a UK average of 76.2 and the best-performing sector, Non-food Retail, on 81.6.

Poor customer services scores are a lead indicator for poor financial performance

Most concerning for the telecoms industry is the work that ACSI has undertaken showing that customer satisfaction is linked to the financial performance of the overall economy and the performance of individual sectors and companies. The organisation states:

  • Customer satisfaction is a leading indicator of company financial performance. Stocks of companies with high ACSI scores tend to do better than those of companies with low scores.
  • Changes in customer satisfaction affect the general willingness of households to buy. As such, price-adjusted ACSI is a leading indicator of consumer spending growth and has accounted for more of the variation in future spending growth than any other single factor.

Source: American Customer Satisfaction index (http://www.theacsi.org/about-acsi/key-acsi-findings)  

In other words, consistently poor performance by all major players in the telecoms industry in the US and UK suggests aspirations of growth may be wildly optimistic. Put simply, why would customers buy more services from companies they don’t like? This bodes ill for the financial performance of telecoms operators going forward.

Senior management within telecoms knows this. They want to improve customer satisfaction by offering new and better services and customer care. But change has proved incredibly difficult and other more agile players always seem to beat operators to the punch. The next section shows why.

 

  • Introduction
  • Everyone loves to moan about telcos
  • A structural problem
  • So should we give up?
  • Customer satisfaction is proving elusive in mature markets
  • Telecoms operators perform materially worst on customer service than other players in the US and UK
  • Poor customer services scores are a lead indicator for poor financial performance
  • ‘One-function’ telecommunications technology stymies innovation and growth
  • Telecoms has always been an ‘infrastructure play’
  • …which means inflexibility and lack of innovation is hard-wired into the operating model
  • Why ‘Telco 2.0’ is so important for operators
  • Telco 2.0 aspirations remain thwarted
  • Technology can truly ‘change the game’ for operators

 

  • Figure 1: Customers are generally dissatisfied with telecoms companies
  • Figure 2: Historically, capital deployment has driven telecoms revenue
  • Figure 3: Financial & operational metrics for Infrastructure player (Vodafone) vs Platform (Google) & Product Innovator (Unilever)

Mobile app latency in Europe: French operators lead; Italian & Spanish lag

Latency as a proxy for customer app experience

Latency is a measure of the time taken for a packet of data to travel from one designated point to another. The complication comes in defining the start and end point. For an operator seeking to measure its network latency, it might measure only the transmission time across its network.

However, to objectively measure customer app experience, it is better to measure the time it takes from the moment the user takes an action, such as pressing a button on a mobile device, to receiving a response – in effect, a packet arriving back and being processed by the application at the device.

This ‘total roundtrip latency’ time is what is measured by our partner, Crittercism, via embedded code within applications themselves on an aggregated and anonymised basis. Put simply, total roundtrip latency is the best measure of customer experience because it encompasses the total ‘wait time’ for a customer, not just a portion of the multi-stage journey

Latency is becoming increasingly important

Broadband speeds tend to attract most attention in the press and in operator advertising, and speed does of course impact downloads and streaming experiences. But total roundtrip latency has a bigger impact on many user digital experiences than speed. This is because of the way that applications are built.

In modern Web applications, the business logic is parcelled-out into independent ‘microservices’ and their responses re-assembled by the client to produce the overall digital user experience. Each HTTP request is often quite small, although an overall onscreen action can be composed of a number of requests of varying sizes so broadband speed is often less of a factor than latency – the time to send and receive each request. See Appendix 2: Why latency is important, for a more detailed explanation of why latency is such an important driver of customer app experience.

The value of using actual application latency data

As we have already explained, STL Partners prefers to use total roundtrip latency as an indicator of customer app experience as it measures the time that a customer waits for a response following an action. STL Partners believes that Crittercism data reflects actual usage in each market because it operates within apps – in hundreds of thousands of apps that people use in the Apple App Store and in Google Play. This is a quite different approach to other players which require users to download a specific app which then ‘pings’ a server and awaits a response. This latter approach has a couple of limitations:

1. Although there have been several million downloads of the OpenSignal and Actual Experience app, this doesn’t get anywhere near the number of people that have downloaded apps containing the Crittercism measurement code.

2. Because the Crittercism code is embedded within apps, it directly measures the latency experienced by users when using those apps1. A dedicated measurement app fails to do this. It could be argued that a dedicated app gives the ‘cleanest’ app reading – it isn’t affected by variations in app design, for example. This is true but STL Partners believes that by aggregating the data for apps such variation is removed and a representative picture of total roundtrip latency revealed. Crittercism data can also show more granular data. For example, although we haven’t shown it in this report, Crittercism data can show latency performance by application type – e.g. Entertainment, Shopping, and so forth – based on the categorisation of apps used by Google and Apple in their app stores.

A key premise of this analysis is that, because operators’ customer bases are similar within and across markets, the profile of app usage (and therefore latency) is similar from one operator to the next. The latency differences between operators are, therefore, down to the performance of the operator.

Why it isn’t enough to measure average latency

It is often said that averages hide disparities in data, and this is particularly true for latency and for customer experience. This is best illustrated with an example. In Figure 2 we show the distribution of latencies for two operators. Operator A has lots of very fast requests and a long tail of requests with high latencies.

Operator B has much fewer fast requests but a much shorter tail of poor-performing latencies. The chart clearly shows that operator B has a much higher percentage of requests with a satisfactory latency even though its average latency performance is lower than operator A (318ms vs 314ms). Essentially operator A is let down by its slowest requests – those that prevent an application from completing a task for a customer.

This is why in this report we focus on average latency AND, critically, on the percentage of requests that are deemed ‘unsatisfactory’ from a customer experience perspective.

Using latency as a measure of performance for customers

500ms as a key performance cut-off

‘Good’ roundtrip latency is somewhat subjective and there is evidence that experience declines in a linear fashion as latency increases – people incrementally drop off the site. However, we have picked 500ms (or half a second) as a measure of unsatisfactory performance as we believe that a delay of more than this is likely to impact mobile users negatively (expectations on the ‘fixed’ internet are higher). User interface research from as far back as 19682 suggests that anything below 100ms is perceived as “instant”, although more recent work3 on gamers suggests that even lower is usually better, and delay starts to become intrusive after 200-300ms. Google experiments from 20094 suggest that a lasting effect – users continued to see the site as “slow” for several weeks – kicked in above 400ms.

Percentage of app requests with total roundtrip latency above 500ms – markets

Five key markets in Europe: France, Germany, Italy, and the UK.

This first report looks at five key markets in Europe: France, Germany, Italy, and the UK. We explore performance overall for Europe by comparing the relative performance of each country and then dive into the performance of operators within each country.

We intend to publish other reports in this series, looking at performance in other regions – North America, the Middle East and Asia, for example. This first report is intended to provider a ‘taster’ to readers, and STL Partners would like feedback on additional insight that readers would welcome, such as latency performance by:

  • Operating system – Android vs Apple
  • Specific device – e.g. Samsung S6 vs iPhone 6
  • App category – e.g. shopping, games, etc.
  • Specific countries
  • Historical trends

Based on this feedback, STL Partners and Crittercism will explore whether it is valuable to provide specific total roundtrip latency measurement products.

Contents

  • Latency as a proxy for customer app experience
  • ‘Total roundtrip latency’ is the best measure for customer ‘app experience’
  • Latency is becoming increasingly important
  • STL Partners’ approach
  • Europe: UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain
  • Quantitative Analysis
  • Key findings
  • UK: EE, O2, Vodafone, 3
  • Quantitative Analysis
  • Key findings
  • Germany: T-Mobile, Vodafone, e-Plus, O2
  • Quantitative Analysis
  • Key findings
  • France: Orange, SFR, Bouygues Télécom, Free
  • Quantitative Analysis
  • Key findings
  • Italy: TIM, Vodafone, Wind, 3
  • Quantitative Analysis
  • Key findings
  • Spain: Movistar, Vodafone, Orange, Yoigo
  • Quantitative Analysis
  • Key findings
  • About STL Partners and Telco 2.0
  • About Crittercism
  • Appendix 1: Defining latency
  • Appendix 2: Why latency is important

 

  • Figure 1: Total roundtrip latency – reflecting a user’s ‘wait time’
  • Figure 2: Why a worse average latency can result in higher customer satisfaction
  • Figure 3: Major European markets – average total roundtrip latency (ms)
  • Figure 4: Major European markets – percentage of requests above 500ms
  • Figure 5: The location of Google and Amazon’s European data centres favours operators in France, UK and Germany
  • Figure 6: European operators – average total roundtrip latency (ms)
  • Figure 7: European operators – percentage of requests with latency over 500ms
  • Figure 8: Customer app experience is likely to be particularly poor at 3 Italy, Movistar (Spain) and Telecom Italia
  • Figure 9: UK Operators – average latency (ms)
  • Figure 10: UK operators – percentage of requests with latency over 500ms
  • Figure 11: German Operators – average latency (ms)
  • Figure 12: German operators – percentage of requests with latency over 500ms
  • Figure 13: French Operators – average latency (ms)
  • Figure 14: French operators – percentage of requests with latency over 500ms
  • Figure 15: Italian Operators – average latency (ms)
  • Figure 16: Italian operators – percentage of requests with latency over 500ms
  • Figure 17: Spanish Operators – average latency (ms)
  • Figure 18: Spanish operators – percentage of requests with latency over 500ms
  • Figure 19: Breakdown of HTTP requests in facebook.com, by type and size

Telco 1.0: Death Slide Starts in Europe

Telefonica results confirm that global telecoms revenue decline is on the way

Very weak Q1 2014 results from Telefonica and other European players 

Telefonica’s efforts to transition to a new Telco 2.0 business model are well-regarded at STL Partners.  The company, together with SingTel, topped our recent Telco 2.0 Transformation Index which explored six major Communication Service Providers (AT&T, Verizon, Telefonica, SingTel, Vodafone and Ooredoo) in depth to determine their relative strengths and weaknesses and provide specific recommendations for them, their partners and the industry overall.

But Telefonica’s Q1 2014 results were even worse than recent ones from two other European players, Deutsche Telekom and Orange, which both posted revenue declines of 4%.  Telefonica’s Group revenue came in at €12.2 billion which was down 12% on Q1 2013.  Part of this was a result of the disposal of the Czech subsidiary and weaker currencies in Latin America, in which around 50% of revenue is generated.  Nevertheless, the negative trend for Telefonica and other European players is clear.

As the first chart in Figure 1 shows, Telefonica’s revenues have followed a gentle parabola over the last eight years.  They rose from 2006 to 2010, reaching a peak in Q4 of that year, before declining steadily to leave the company in Q1 2014 back where it started in Q1 2006.

The second chart, however, adds more insight.  It shows the year-on-year percentage growth or decline in revenue for each quarter.  It is clear that between 2006 and 2008 revenue growth was already slowing down and, following the 2008 economic crisis in which Spain (which generates around quarter of Telefonica’s revenue) was hit particularly hard, the company’s revenue declined in 2009.  The economic recovery that followed enabled Telefonica to report growth again in 2010 and 2011 before the underlying structural challenges of the telecoms industry – the decline of voice and messaging – kicked in, resulting in revenue decline since 2012.

Figure 1: Telefonica’s growth and decline over the last 8 years

Telco 2.0 Telefonica Group Revenue

Source: Telefonica, STL Partners analysis

One thing is clear: the only way is down for most CSPs and for the industry overall

The biggest concern for Telefonica and something that STL Partners believes will be replicated in other CSPs over the next few years is the accelerating nature of the decline since the peak.  It seems clear that Telco 1.0 revenues are not going to decline in a steady fashion but, once they reach a tipping point, to tumble away quickly as:

  • Substitute voice and messaging products and alternate forms of communication scale;
  • CSPs fight hard to maintain customers, revenue and share in voice, messaging and data products, via attractive bundles

The results of the European CSPs confirms STL Partners belief that the outlook for the global industry in the next few years is negative overall.  It is clear that telecoms industry maturity is at different stages globally:

  • Europe: in decline
  • US: still growing but very close to the peak
  • Africa, Middle East, Latin America: slowing growth but still 2(?) years before peak
  • Asia: mixed, some markets growing, others in decline

Given these different mixes, STL Partners reaffirms its forecast of 2012 that overall the industry will contract by up to 10% between 2013 and 2017 as core Telco 1.0 service revenue decline accelerates once more and more countries get beyond the peak.  This is illustrated for the mobile industry in Figure 2, below.

Figure 2: Near-term global telecoms decline is assured; longer-term growth is dependent on management actions now

Global mobile telcoms revenue

Source: STL Partners

Upturn in telecoms industry fortunes after 2016 dependent on current activities

If the downturn to 2016 is a virtual certainty, the shape of the recovery beyond this, which STL Partners (tentatively) forecasts, is not. The industry’s fortunes could be much better or worse than the forecast owing to the importance of transformation activities which all players (CSPs, Network Equipment Providers, IT players, etc.) need to make now.

The growth of what we have termed Human Data (personal data for consumers and business customers, including some aspects of Enterprise Mobility), Non-Human Data (connection of devices and applications – Internet of Things, Machine2Machine, Infrastructure as a Service, and some Enterprise Mobility) and Digital Services (end-user and B2B2X enabling applications and services) requires CSPs and their partners to develop new skills, assets, partnerships, customer relationships and operating and financial models – a new business model.

As IBM found in moving from being hardware manufacturer to a services player during the 1990’s, transforming the business model is hard.  IBM was very close to bankruptcy in the early 90’s before disrupting itself and re-emerging as a dominant force again in recent years.  CSPs and NEPs, in particular, are now seeking to do the same and must act decisively from 2013-2016 if they are to enjoy a rebirth rather than continued and sustained decline.

Why closing Telefonica Digital should make Telefonica more digital (and innovative)

Several different CSP organisation designs for Telco 2.0 Service Innovation

Telefonica is one of the companies that we have analysed in depth in the Telco 2.0 Transformation Index research. In this report, we analyse Telefonica’s recent announcement that it is restructuring its Digital Business unit. We’ll also be exploring strategies for transformation at the OnFuture EMEA 2014 Brainstorm, June 11-12, London.

Telco 2.0 strategy is a key driver of organisation design

We have defined Telco 2.0 and, specifically, Telco 2.0 Happy Piper and Telco 2.0 Service Provider strategies in other reports  so will not focus on the implications of each on service offerings and customer segments here.  It is, however, important to understand the implications each strategy has on the organisation in terms of capability requirements and, by definition, on organisation design – structure, processes, skills and so forth.

As Figure 1 shows, the old Telco 1.0 world required CSPs to focus on infrastructure-oriented capabilities – cost, service assurance, provisioning, network quality of service, and congestion management.

For a Telco 2.0 Happy Piper, these capabilities are even more important:

  • Being low-cost in a growing telecoms market gives a company an advantage; being low-cost in a shrinking telecoms market, such as Europe, can mean the difference between surviving and going under.
  • Congestion management was important in the voice-oriented telecoms market of yesteryear but is even more so in the data-centric market in which different applications (including voice) co-exist on different networks – 2G, 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi, Fibre, Copper, etc.

Telco 2.0 Happy Pipers also need to expand their addressable market in order to thrive – into Infrastructure Services, M2M, Embedded Connectivity and, in some cases, into Enterprise ICT including bespoke vertical industry solutions.  For sure this requires some new Service Development capabilities but, perhaps more importantly, also new partnerships – both in terms of service development and delivery – and a greater focus on Customer Experience Management and ‘Customer data/Big data’ in order to deliver valuable solutions to demanding enterprise customers.

For a Telco 2.0 Service Provider, the range of new capabilities required is even greater:

  • The ability to develop new platform and end-user (consumer and enterprise) services.
  • Brand management – not just creating a stolid telecoms brand but a vibrant end-user one.
  • New partners in other industries – financial services, media, advertising, start-ups, developers and so forth.


Figure 1: Capabilities needed for different Telco 2.0 strategies

Fig1 Capabilities need for different Telco 2.0 Strategies

Source: STL Partners/Telco 2.0

Most leading CSPs are pursuing a Telco 2.0 ‘Service Provider’ strategy

STL Partners analysis suggests that the majority of CSPs (and certainly all the tier 1 and 2 players) have at least some aspirations as a Telco 2.0 Service Provider.  Several, such as AT&T, Deutsche Telekom Orange, SingTel, Telefonica and Telenor, have been public with their ‘digital services’ aspirations.

But even more circumspect players such as Verizon and Vodafone which have to date largely focused on core telecommunications services have aspirations to move beyond this.  Verizon, for example, is participating in the ISIS joint venture on payments, albeit something of a slow burn at present.  Vodafone has also pushed into payments in developing markets via its successes with mPesa in Kenya and is (perhaps a slightly reluctant) partner in the WEVE JV in the UK on digital commerce.

Further back in their Telco 2.0 development owing to the attractiveness of their markets from a Telco 1.0 perspective are the players in the rapidly developing Middle Eastern and Asian markets such as Axiata, Etisalat, Mobily, Ooredoo, and Zain.  These players too aspire to achieve more than Happy Piper status and are already pushing into advertising, content and payments for consumers and M2M and Cloud for enterprises.

Telco 2.0 Service Providers are adopting different organisation designs

It is clear that there is no consensus among management about how to implement Telco 2.0 services. This is not surprising given how new it is for telecoms operators to develop and deliver new services – innovation is not something associated with telcos.  Everyone is learning how to take their first tentative steps into the wonderful but worrisome world of innovation – like toddlers stepping into the shallow beach waters of the ocean.

There is no tried and tested formula for setting up an organisation that delivers innovation but there is consensus (among STL Partners’ contacts at least) that a different organisation structure is needed to the one that manages the core infrastructure business.  Most also agree that the new skills, partnerships, operational and financial model associated with Telco 2.0 innovation needs to be ring-fenced and protected from its mature Telco 1.0 counterpart.

The degree of separation between the old and new is the key area of debate.  We lay out the broad options in Figure 2.

Fig 2 Organisation design models for Telco 2.0 Service Innovation

Fig 2 Organisation design models for Telco 2.0 Service Innovation

Source: STL Partners/Telco 2.0

For some, a central independent strategy unit that identifies potential innovations and undertakes an initial evaluation is a sufficient degree of separation.  AT&T and Verizon in the US have gone down this route – see Figure 3.

Fig 3 Organisation design approaches of 9 CSPs across 4 regions

Fig 3 Organisation design approaches of 9 CSPs across 4 regions

Source: STL Partners/Telco 2.0

In this model, ideas that are deemed promising are handed over the operating units to develop and deliver where, frankly, many are ignored or wallow in what one executive described to us as ‘Telco goo’ – the slow processes associated with the 20-year investment cycles of an infrastructure business.

Players such as Etisalat, Mobily and Ooredoo that are taking their first steps into Telco 2.0 services, but harbouring great aspirations, have gone a step further than this and set up Central Innovation Units.   In additional to innovation ideation and evaluation, these units typically undertake piloting, investment and, in some cases, some modest product development.  This approach is a sensible ‘first step’ into innovation and echoes the earlier attempts by many multi-national European players in the early 2000’s that had central group marketing functions that undertook proposition development for several countries.  The benefit is that the company can focus most resources on growth in existing Telco 1.0 services and Telco 2.0 solutions do not become a major distraction.  The downside is that Telco 2.0 services are seen as small and distant are always far less important than voice, messaging and connectivity services or devices ranges that can make a big impact in the next 3-6 months.

Finally, the most ambitious Telco 2.0 Service Providers – Deutsche Telekom, SingTel, Telenor, Telefonica and others – have developed separate New Business Units  The Telco 2.0 New Business Unit is given end-to-end responsibility for Telco 2.0 services.  The units find, develop, launch and manage new digital services and have full P&L responsibility.

STL Partners has long been a fan of this approach.  Innovation is given room to develop and grow under the guidance of senior management.  It has a high profile within the organisation but different targets, processes, people and partnerships to the core business which, left unchecked, would intentionally or unintentionally kill the new ‘rival’ off.

Five Principles for developing a Telco 2.0 New Business Unit

  1. Full control and responsibility.  The unit must have the independence from the core business to be able to control its own destiny and not be advertently or inadvertently impeded by the core business.  Telefonica, for example, went as far as to give its unit a separate physical location in central London.
  2. Senior management support.  While the unit is largely independent, it must be part of the corporate strategy and decisions about it must be made at the highest level.  In other words, the unit must be tied to the core business right at the top of the organisation – it is not completely free and decisions must be made for the overall good of the company.  Sometimes those decisions will be to the benefit or detriment of either the core business or the new business unit.  This is inevitable and not a cause for alarm – but these decisions need to be considered carefully and rationally by the senior team.
  3. Go OTT to start with.  One of the challenges faced by senior managers is how to leverage the capabilities of the core business – the network, customer data, retail outlets, brand, etc. – in the digital services offered by the new unit.  Clearly, it makes sense to use these assets to differentiate against the OTT players.  However, STL Partners recommends not trying to do this initially as the complexity of building successful interfaces between the new unit and the core business will prove too challenging.  Instead, establish some momentum with OTT services that the new unit can develop and deliver independently, without drawing on the core business, before then adding some specific core business capabilities such as location data, customer preference data or network QoS.
  4. Don’t forget to change management incentives …There is no point in filling the new business unit with senior management and fresh talent imbued with new skills and undertaking new business processes and practices unless they are clearly incentivised to make the right decisions!  It seems an obvious point but CSPs have a long and successful infrastructure legacy which means that management incentives are typically suitable for this type of business.  Managers typically have to hit high EBITDA margins, revenue targets that equate to around 50% of the capital base being generated a year, strong on-going capital investment – things that are at odds with a product innovation business (lower EBITDA margins, much lower capital intensity).  Management incentives need to change to reflect this and the fact that they business is a start-up not a bolt-on the core business.  These incentives need to be specific and can affect those in the core business as well as new unit.For example, if collaboration between the new unit and the core business units is a key requirement for long-term success (to build Telco 2.0 services that leverage core assets), then instigate a 360º feedback programme for all managers that measures how effectively they collaborate with their counter-parties in the other business units.  Scores here could be used to determine bonuses, share options or promotion – a sure way to instigate the required behaviour!
  5. …and investor metrics.  As mentioned above, a product innovation business has a different financial model to an infrastructure business.  Because of this, a new set of investor metrics is required focusing on lower margins and capital intensity.  Furthermore, users will often be a key metric rather than subscribers.  In other words, many users will not directly generate revenue (just as they do not for Google or Facebook) but remain an important driver of third-party sponsorship and advertising revenues.  Linked to this, ARPU will become a less important metric for the new business unit because the end user will be one of several revenue sources.

Many of the leading telecoms players have, therefore, done the right thing with the development of their digital units. So why have they struggled so much with culture clashes between the core telecoms business and the new digital innovations?  The answer lies in the way the units have been set up – their scope and role, the people that reside within them, and the processes and metrics that are used to develop and deliver services. This is covered in the next section of this report.

 

  • Even the boldest players are too Telco-centric with their digital business units
  • Defining traditional and new Telco 2.0 services
  • Current digital business units cover all the new Telco 2.0 services but should they?
  • Option: Reduce the scope of the Digital Business Units
  • Telefonica’s recent closure of Telefonica Digital
  • How might Telefonica’s innovation and ‘digital services’ strategy play out?

 

  • Figure 4: Defining Telco 2.0 new services
  • Figure 5: The mixed bag of services found in current digital business units
  • Figure 6: Separate new Telco 2.0 Services from traditional telecoms ones
  • Figure 8: The organisation structure at Telefonica
  • Figure 9: Telefonica’s strategic options for implementing ‘digital services’

Free Mobile: A Prototype for Disruption?

Summary: Free.fr’s entry to the French mobile market has achieved extraordinarily rapid market share gains and resulted in comprehensive disruption. An analysis of its technology, tactics, and business model, and a high-level assessment of the applicability of its approach to other markets. (February 2013, Executive Briefing Service Dealing with Disruption Stream).

Mobile Market Share in France 2012 - Free 2013
  Read in Full (Members only)   To Subscribe click here

Below is an extract from this 25 page Telco 2.0 Briefing Report that can be downloaded in full in PDF format by members of the Telco 2.0 Executive Briefing service and Dealing with Disruption Stream here. We’ll be publishing more on Digital Commerce in in 2013 and it will be a key theme at our Executive Brainstorms in Silicon Valley (March 2013), and Europe (London, June 2013). Non-members can subscribe here and for this and other enquiries, please email contact@telco2.net / call +44 (0) 207 247 5003.

Introduction: A Wave of Disruption

A major theme in our work on mobile operator strategy recently has been the potential for disruption on price. In the European Mobile: The Future’s not Bright, it’s Brutal report, we forecast a substantial decline in voice and messaging revenues across Europe, and identified a group of relatively high-priced markets in challenging Southern European economies that were especially at risk from a competitive shock. 

In the subsequent Europe’s Brutal Future: Vodafone & Telefonica hit hard we responded to the announcement of grim results at Telefonica and Vodafone’s southern European units. And in Sprint-Softbank: how it will disrupt the US market, we looked at the state of the US mobile market as Sprint is acquired by Softbank and investment starts to flow into T-Mobile USA.

Further, since we published the Sprint-Softbank note, 3UK has announced that it is planning to launch LTE later this year, as soon as the disbursed 1800MHz spectrum from the EverythingEverywhere merger becomes available. The service will be launched at a zero price premium to their 3G tariffs. This contrasts with EE’s initial pricing, which tried to define 4G as a premium product, and suggests that whatever pricing power their go-it-alone LTE deployment gave them will be very short-lived.

So it appears that structural pressures, like macroeconomic problems, the concentration of unemployment among the young (an early-adopter demographic), and the increasing availability and adoption of alternatives (Skype, BBM, Whatsapp, etc), are bearing down on prices in many markets. One outcome is that eventually operators will be forced to cut prices and therefore accept gradual reductions in their profit margins. Another outcome is more radical disruption through the entry of new players, which if successful can have a much higher impact on incumbent players. 

In this note, we will look at the disruption of the French MNO market brought about by the entry of Free Mobile, which is both a case study of best practice and also one that illustrates some of the key constraints on disruption. We identify a new class of operator, the low-cost disruptor, empowered by software to go after incumbents’ margins, and look at the criteria for their success.

Market Background

In France, everything was stable pre-2012

France, before Free’s entry to the market, was one of the less competitive and pricier mobile markets in Europe with three operators only, one of them being the part-nationalised incumbent France Telecom. Immediately before Free Mobile’s launch, Fitch Ratings estimated the price of a minute of mobile voice in France at €0.10, compared to €0.07 in the UK or Germany . In terms of monthly ARPU, we can see that the cheapest French operator (interestingly, the incumbent) has usually been around €15 a month dearer than the average German operator and about €10 a month dearer than the average British operator. 

Figure 1: France, a high-price market
Monthly ARPU in France & EU Markets Feb 2013

Source: STL

The regulator, ARCEP, was often characterised as being relatively weak, or else committed to a strategy of letting the operators have more margin in the hope of encouraging infrastructure development.

Politically, this isn’t quite accurate. Importantly, ARCEP wasn’t the only actor involved – the ministries and regional governments also had a substantial voice in policy, and the incumbent enjoyed special access to the top level of politics as a major state enterprise. (In fact, for part of the 2000s, the French minister of finance’s previous job was CEO of France Telecom.) 

Although the European Union’s Information Society, Competition, and Internal Market directorates also influenced the regulatory environment, telecoms is one of the fields where responsibility is shared between the EU and national authorities, and France is a big enough power within the EU to largely shape its own policy. This typically expresses a preference for the development of large national champion companies, and for infrastructure development over either competition or consumer protection.

On the other hand, ARCEP was one of the first regulators to permit independent ISPs to use the incumbent’s civil works infrastructure, and the public sector was very active in investing in middle-mile dark fibre. The upshot of this was that France has a fixed ISP market that offers customers remarkable value – FTTH is more available, speeds are better, and voice pricing is better for comparable rates to those prevailing in the UK, which has a roughly comparable market structure.

Free.fr’s fixed market entry

A major driver of this was a disruptive entrant, Free.fr. Free has been intensively studied, but we will briefly recap some key points. Free’s flagship service offering is €29.99/mo for everything, that including their fastest Internet service, unlimited VoIP to many destinations, and a variety of IT services. Over time, the purity of this price point has been diluted, but it still exists for new subscribers. Free.fr has no marketing department in a classical sense, and their tech support is largely provided by a network of partners recruited from the subscriber base.

On the other hand, they have historically invested without compromise in technology. Not only does Free develop its own software, it developed a succession of very successful set-top boxes, and it even developed its own ADSL2+ equipment. Further, they were an early adopter of FTTH, benefiting from the regulated access to civil works and the public investment in middle-mile fibre. Free was one of the first ISPs to provide IPv6 to end users. The TVPerso service was a pioneering user-generated content platform that provided multicast live streaming years ahead of anyone else. 

Figure 2: A disruptive product play – one product, everything, one price, €30
Logica February 2013

Source: Rudolf van den Berg, Logica 

In mobile, however, the picture was rather different. Only three operators, and one of those being the main supplier of backhaul connectivity, resulted in relatively little competition and high ARPUs and margins in the international context. Market share, particularly, has been remarkably, almost suspiciously, stable over time, as the following chart demonstrates.

Figure 3: Market share in France since 2005
Market Share in France 2005-2011 February 2013

Source: STL

Until, of course, Free became a mobile operator, launching on the 10th January 2012.

Free.fr enters mobile: a pure happy pipe strategy

Free Mobile’s product strategy could not have been simpler. It had two key points: price, and quantity. As with the fixed ISP product, the strategy was to offer big bundles at low prices, notably by unbundling the price of the mobile device from the service contract. The best deal was the bring-your-own-device option. (We also saw this with Softbank.) 

Specifically, there were two options at launch. New subscribers could pay €20/mo for unlimited national calls and international calls to 40 countries, unlimited messaging, and 3GB/mo of Internet service. Existing subscribers to fixed service benefited from a discount to €16/mo. There was also an ultra-low cost plan, which offers 60 minutes of voice and 60 text messages for €2/mo with no contractual commitment and no phone, and overage set at €0.05/minute. This was free as an add-on to an existing fixed subscription. In general, Free Mobile customers remain free to switch provider on a rolling basis, rather than being tied in for the duration of the contract.

As Diffraction Analysis’ Benoit Felten points out, the company traditionally targeted two groups, technology-focused early adopters, and price-driven discount chasers . As a result, as well as bringing your own phone, you could also have the latest iPhone, unlocked, if you were willing to pay an additional €19.99/mo.

Bigger bundles at lower prices suggest a material cost advantage over other players. This is the essence of a Telco 2.0 Happy Piper: engineer operations for efficient bulk IP traffic delivery and ensure prices remain below those offered by competitors and, at the same time, deliver acceptable margins.

Impact

Free rapidly gained subscribers from the other MNOs and from the MVNO sector, and probably also from new adopters on the ultra-low cost tariffs. By the end of March, it had gained 2.6 million subscribers, 4% of the market, and declared a target of between 15 and 25 per cent market share.  By mid-year, its market share had passed 5%, and by the end of Q3 2012 (the last published results), 6.4%, or 4.4 million subscribers with a run-rate of 270,000 net-adds per month.

Figure 4: Free Mobile Reaches 6.4% Share in 9 Months
Market Share in France, 1st 9 Months 2012 February 2013

 Source: WCIS, STL

This resulted in a price shock across the entire market and a rapid rise in indicators of competition generally. It also resulted in a surge of additional subscriber growth.

To read the note in full, including the following sections detailing support for the analysis…

  • How did Free.fr get there?
  • The fight for a license
  • The ‘MVNO plus’ network strategy
  • The role of Freebox set-top boxes
  • Getting Beyond the Unlimited Data Wars
  • Low-Cost Disruptors: International Examples
  • USA: Republic Wireless
  • Global voice-focused: Truphone
  • A failed attempt: UK01
  • Wholesale: Virgin Media
  • Key factors in the business model
  • Technical Arbitrage
  • Software Power
  • The Regulatory and Economic Environment
  • Could it happen here?
  • STL Partners and the Telco 2.0™ Initiative
  • Telco 2.0™ ‘two-sided’ telecoms business model

…and the following figures…

  • Figure 1: France, a high-price market
  • Figure 2: A disruptive product play – one product, everything, one price, €30
  • Figure 3: Market share in France since 2005
  • Figure 4: Free Mobile Reaches 6.4% Share in 9 Months
  • Figure 5: Contract-free subscribers in France, 2008-2012
  • Figure 6: Mobile number portability usage in France, 2007-2012
  • Figure 7: An overview of the disruption
  • Figure 8: ARPUs driven down industry-wide
  • Figure 9: 4th Mobile Operators’ Performance Over 1st 6 Years
  • Figure 10: The Urban Core – Orange Dominates the Base Station Count
  • Figure 11: The Disparity Is Much Less In The Suburbs
  • Figure 12: % of time connected to Free’s own network; 900MHz refarming causes a sharp spike
  • Figure 13: Use cases for software-defined networking in the Free context 

…Members of the Telco 2.0 Executive Briefing Subscription Service and Dealing with Disruption Stream can download the full 25 page report in PDF format here. Non-Members, please subscribe here. For this or other enquiries, please email contact@telco2.net / call +44 (0) 207 247 5003.

A Practical Guide to Implementing Telco 2.0

 

Detailed table of contents

Section

Sub-sections

Part One: Identifying Telco 2.0 Opportunities

Developing the Right Telco 2.0 Strategy
  • Applying Porter’s thinking to the current telecoms market
  • Generic Telco 2.0 strategic options
  • Telco 2.0 strategies: how they drive shareholder returns
  • Which Telco 2.0 strategy for your organisation
  • Strategy comparison case studies: A Telco 2.0 Happy Piper (Vodafone UK) versus Telco 2.0 Service Player (O2)

Identifying & Prioritising Telco 2.0 Innovations
  • A taxonomy of Telco 2.0 opportunities
  • From isolated innovations to an integrated platform
  • Two approaches to identifying Telco 2.0 innovations
  • Approaches
  • Case study:  The STL Partners Innovation Scouting Service
  • Evaluating the potential opportunities: a structured approach to screening

Part Two: Implementing Telco 2.0 Opportunities

Introduction
  • A framework for innovation and business model transformation for telecoms

Service Offerings: Bringing Telco 2.0 Propositions to Market
  • A 12-stage end-to-end process for service development
    1. 1. Customer intentions and draft press release
    2. 2. Detailed value proposition and use cases
    3. 3. Fast validation with users
    4. 4. Capabilities assessment and own/partner role definitions
    5. 5. Revenue and cost models
    6. 6. Evaluation and business case
    7. 7. Competition and regulation
    8. 8. Technology and build process
    9. 9. Proof of Concept and final build
    10. 10. Sales and marketing
    11. 11. Launch
    12. 12. Evaluation and continuous development
  • Case studies: Vodafone 360, O2 Priority Moments
  • Checklists and templates for each stage

Value Network: Internal – Getting the Organisation Right to Deliver Telco 2.0 Innovation
  • Centralised versus decentralized organization structures
  • Integrating Telco 2.0 into the core organisation versus creating an independent unit
  • Case studies on different approaches: Telefonica and KPN

Value Network: External – Partnering to Grow the Pie
  • Evaluating closed versus open business models
  • Collaborating with other operators – when and how to do it
  • Working with other service providers – start-ups, established vendors and ‘OTT players’
  • Determining when to collaborate and when to compete

Technology: Prioritising Activities to Support Business Transformation
  • Understanding the developing demands on IT resources
  • Priority new functional area: Customer data
  • Approaches to IT transformation: Big Bang versus Continuous Improvement
  • Evaluating IT transformation approaches: a structured screening methodology
  • Case studies on IT transformation approaches: Vodafone and Telefonica

Finance: Optimising the Telco 2.0 Revenue & Cost Model
  • Revenue drivers: key revenue models and sources of revenue
  • Cost drivers: key types of cost and cost models
  • A framework for guiding decisions about revenue and cost management
  • Implications of new business models on financial and operational metrics

Marketplace: Managing the Regulatory Environment
  • Making the case against net neutrality…
  • …and for the ability to collaborate with other telecoms players to build value
  • Recommended next steps for CEOs

Cloud 2.0: the fight for the next wave of customers

Summary: The fight for the Cloud Services market is about to move into new segments and territories. In the build up to the launch of our new strategy report, ‘Telco strategies in the Cloud’, we review perspectives on this shared at the 2012 EMEA and Silicon Valley Executive Brainstorms by strategists from major telcos and tech players, including: Orange, Telefonica, Verizon, Vodafone, Amazon, Bain, Cisco, and Ericsson (September 2012, , Executive Briefing Service, Cloud & Enterprise ICT Stream). Cloud Growth Groups September 2012
  Read in Full (Members only)   To Subscribe click here

Below is an extract from this 33 page Telco 2.0 Briefing Report that can be downloaded in full in PDF format by members of the Telco 2.0 Executive Briefing service and the Cloud and Enterprise ICT Stream here. Non-members can subscribe here and for this and other enquiries, please email contact@telco2.net / call +44 (0) 207 247 5003.

Introduction

As part of the New Digital Economics Executive Brainstorm series, future strategies in Cloud Services were explored at the New Digital Economics Silicon Valley event at the Marriott Hotel, San Francisco, on the 27th March, 2012, and the second EMEA Cloud 2.0 event at the Grange St. Pauls Hotel on the 13th June 2012.

At the events, over 200 specially-invited senior executives from across the communications, media, retail, finance and technology sectors looked at how to make money from cloud services and the role and strategies of telcos in this industry, using a widely acclaimed interactive format called ‘Mindshare’.

This briefing summarises key points, participant votes, and our high-level take-outs from across the events, and focuses on the common theme that the cloud market is evolving to address new customers, and the consequence of this change on strategy and implementation. We are also publishing a comprehensive report on Cloud 2.0: Telco Strategies in the Cloud.

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Executive Summary

The end of the beginning

The first phase of enterprise cloud services has been dominated by the ‘big tech’ and web players like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, who have developed highly sophisticated cloud operations at enormous scale. The customers in this first round are the classic ‘early adopters’ of enterprise ICT – players with a high proportion of IT genes in their corporate DNA such as Netflix, NASA, Silicon Valley start ups, some of the world’s largest industrial and marketing companies, and the IT industry itself. There is little doubt that these leading customers and major suppliers will retain their leading edge status in the market.

The next phase of cloud market development is the move into new segments in the broader market. Participants at the EMEA brainstorm thought that a combination of new customers and new propositions would drive the most growth in the next 3 years.

UK Services Revenues: Actual and Forecast (index)

These new segments comprise both industries and companies outside the early adopters in developed markets, and companies in new territories in emerging and developing markets. These customers are typically less technology oriented, more focused on business requirements, and need a combination of de-mystification of cloud and support to develop and run such systems.

Closer to the customer

There are opportunities for telcos in this evolving landscape. While the major players’ scale will be hard to beat, there are opportunities in the new segments in being ‘closer to the customer’. This involves telcos leveraging potential advantages of:

  • existing customer relationships, existing enterprise IT assets, and channels to markets (where they exist);
  • geographical proximity, where telcos can build, locate and connect more directly to overcome data sovereignty and latency issues.

Offering unique, differentiated services

Telcos should also be able to leverage existing assets and capabilities through APIs in the cloud to create distinctive offerings to enterprise and SME customers:

  • Network assets will enable better management of cloud services by allowing greater control of the network components;
  • Data assets will enable a wider range of potential applications for cloud services that use telco data (such as identification services);
  • And communications assets (such as APIs to voice and messaging) will allow communications services to be built in to cloud applications.

Next steps for telcos

  • Telcos need to move fast to leverage their existing relationships with customers both large and small and optimise their cloud offerings in line with new trends in the enterprise ICT market, such as bring-your-own-device (BYOD).
  • Customers are increasingly looking to outsource business processes to cut costs, and telcos are well-placed to take advantage of this opportunity.
  • Telcos need to continue to partner with independent software vendors, in order to build new products and services. Telcos should also focus on tight integration between their core services and cloud services or cloud service providers (either delivered by themselves or by third parties.) During the events, we saw examples from Vodafone, Verizon and Orange amongst others.
  • Telcos should also look at the opportunity to act as cloud service brokers. For example, delivering a mash up of Google Apps, Workday and other services that are tightly integrated with telco products, such as billing, support, voice and data services. The telco could ensure that the applications work well together and deliver a fully supported, managed and billed suite of products.
  • Identity management and security also came through as strong themes and there is a natural role for telcos to play here. Telcos already have a trusted billing relationship and hold personal customer information. Extending this capability to offer pre-population of forms, acting as an authentication broker on behalf of other services and integrating information about location and context through APIs would represent additional business and revenue generating opportunities.
  • Most telcos are already exploring opportunities to exploit APIs, which will enable them to start offering network-as-a-service, voice-as-a-service, device management, billing integration and other services. Depending on platform and network capability, there are literally hundreds of APIs that telcos could offer to external developers. These APIs could be used to develop applications that are integrated with telcos’ network product or service, which in turn makes the telco more relevant to their customers.

We will be exploring these strategies in depth in Cloud 2.0: Telco Strategies in the Cloud and at the invitation only New Digital Economics Executive Brainstorms in Digital Arabia in Dubai, 6-7 November, and Digital Asia in Singapore, 3-5 December, 2012.

Key questions explored at the brainstorms and in this briefing:

  • How will the Cloud Services market evolve?
  • Which customer and service segments are growing fastest (Iaas, PaaS, SaaS)?
  • What are the critical success factors to market adoption?
  • Who will be the leading players, and how will it impact different sectors?
  • What are the telcos’ strengths and who are the most advanced telcos today?
  • Which aspects of the cloud services market should they pursue first?
  • Where should telcos compete with IT companies and where should they cooperate?
  • What must telcos do to secure their share of the cloud and how much time do they have?

Stimulus Speakers/Panelists

Telcos

  • Peter Martin, Head of Strategy, Cloud Computing, Orange Group
  • Moisés Navarro Marín, Director, Strategy Global Cloud Services, Telefonica Digital
  • Alex Jinivizian, Head of Enterprise Strategy, Verizon Enterprise Solutions
  • Robert Brace, Head of Cloud Services, Vodafone Group

Technology Companies

  • Mohan Sadashiva, VP & GM, Cloud Services, Aepona
  • Gustavo Reyna, Solutions Marketing Manager, Aepona
  • Iain Gavin, Head of EMEA Web Services, Amazon
  • Pat Adamiak, Senior Director, Cloud Solutions, Cisco
  • Charles J. Meyers, President, Equinix Americas
  • Arun Bhikshesvaran, CMO, Ericsson
  • John Zanni, VP of Service Provider Marketing & Alliances, Parallels

Consulting & Industry Analysis

  • Chris Brahm, Partner, Head of Americas Technology Practices, Bain
  • Andrew Collinson, Research Director, STL Partners

With thanks to our Silicon Valley 2012 event sponsors and partners:

Silicon Valley 2012 Event Sponsors

And our EMEA 2012 event sponsors:

EMEA 2012 Event Sponsors

To read the note in full, including the following sections detailing support for the analysis…

  • Round 2 of the Cloud Fight
  • Selling to new customers
  • What channels are needed?
  • How will telcos perform in cloud?
  • With which services will telcos succeed?
  • How can telcos differentiate?
  • Comments on telcos’ role, objectives and opportunities
  • Four telcos’ perspectives
  • Telefonica Digital – focusing on business requirements
  • Verizon – Cloud as a key Platform
  • Orange Business Services – communications related cloud
  • Vodafone – future cloud vision
  • Techco’s Perspectives
  • Amazon – A history of Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • Cisco – a world of many clouds
  • Ericsson – the networked society and telco cloud
  • Aepona – Cloud Brokerage & ‘Network as a Service’ (NaaS)
  • The Telco 2.0™ Initiative

…and the following figures…

  • Figure 1 – Bain forecasts for business cloud market size
  • Figure 2 – Key barriers to cloud adoption
  • Figure 3 – Identifying the cloud growth markets
  • Figure 4 – Requirements for success
  • Figure 5 – New customers to drive cloud growth
  • Figure 6 – How to increase revenues from cloud services
  • Figure 7 – How to move cloud services forward
  • Figure 8 – Enterprise cloud channels
  • Figure 9 – Small businesses cloud channels
  • Figure 10 – Vote on Telco Cloud Market Share
  • Figure 11 – Telcos’ top differentiators in the cloud
  • Figure 12 – The global reach of Orange Business
  • Figure 13 – The telco as an intermediary
  • Figure 14 – Vodafone’s vision of the cloud
  • Figure 15 – Amazon Web Services’ cloud infrastructure
  • Figure 16 – Cisco’s world of many clouds
  • Figure 17 – Cloud traffic in the data centre
  • Figure 18 – Ericsson’s vision for telco cloud
  • Figure 19 – Summary of Ericsson cloud functions
  • Figure 20 – Aepona Cloud Services Broker
  • Figure 21 – How to deliver network-enhanced cloud services

…Members of the Telco 2.0 Executive Briefing Subscription Service and the Cloud and Enterprise ICT Stream can download the full 33 page report in PDF format here. Non-Members, please subscribe here. For this or other enquiries, please email contact@telco2.net / call +44 (0) 207 247 5003.

Companies and technologies covered: Telefonica, Vodafone, Verizon, Orange, Cloud, Amazon, Google, Ericsson, Cisco, Aepona, Equinix, Parallels, Bain, Telco 2.0, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, private cloud, public cloud, telecom, strategy, innovation, ICT, enterprise.