Around the World

TelecomAsia …
Take Responsibility End-to-End

In this article, reporter Joseph Waring focuses on customer experience as an especially important element contributing to both the success and growth of the telecom industry. He illustrates this by detailing the results of aTelecom Asia-Stratecast survey of operators across Asia Pacific, which found that customer experience management and customer care/self-care were the customer-oriented functions receiving the most attention, with 55-56 percent of those polled pointing to these as top priorities. Following on the heels of customer experience management and customer care/self-care were business analytics and business intelligence, with 44 percent of respondents indicating these areas as receiving the most attention. According to Stratecast’s Karl Whitelock, this prioritisation makes sense. He states that: “They are related, and a focus on one creates a need to update the other. Customer self-care and knowing the customer’s overall service experience is vital in today’s always-on environment.”

This reminded us of a recent post from Olivier Suard in which he discusses customer satisfaction as something that’s not as black and white as mobile broadband speed and capacity. He explains that customer satisfaction is often thought of in terms of smartphone users, but there are still large amounts of mobile phone users who do not own a smartphone. For these people, it’s more likely that what keeps them satisfied are things like accurate billing and how well they can make phone calls or send/receive text messages. For this reason, it’s not surprising that customer care, business analytics and business intelligence ranked high in the Telecom Asia-Stratecast survey – it’s important to think about all different types of customers and the ways they use their devices in order to ensure the best possible experience.

Pyramid Research…
Kenyans Sprint Toward a Strong Telecom Future

The future of telecom seems promising for Kenya, with analyst Majd Hosn detailing the country’s communications market achievements in 2010 and describing its likelihood for success in 2011 and beyond. 3G, number portability and service quality made major strides with the help of the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK). The CCK dramatically reduced interconnection rates as well as the levy for acquiring a 3G license. Additionally, mobile number portability was put into effect and a set of operational rules were enacted that hold operators responsible for a minimum service quality to customers. In terms of growth, Hosn states that 2010 revenue is expected at $1.42 billion—a 5.4 percent increase from 2009. And with an expected 2010 mobile penetration rate of 56 percent, Kenya is certainly looking like it will be prosperous in the telecom space!

Alan Quayle Weblog…
IMS World Forum: Quick Summary

Recently returned from the IMS World Forum earlier this month, Alan Quayle provides an overview of the event and highlights some key presentations. The Forum was a huge success with more than 250 attendees, a 20 percent increase from last year. Alan states that although IMS seems to be fairly old-hat, it’s actually more important than ever to have this sort of IMS-centric event in order to pool ideas on how best to deploy the technology as it becomes more mainstream.  In fact, a 2009 survey revealed that eight percent of operators had deployed IMS for commercial services. Alan is currently in the middle of updating the survey, but results seem to be on track with his expectations—IMS deployments in 2011 will be at roughly 17 percent.

Alan describes the Forum as a roughly equal mix of operators and vendors and a great platform for discussion.  Promising to review these presentations in more detail, Alan lists the following highlights:

• Thomas May from Verizon presented VoLTE experimentation results.
• Wooyong Choi from SKT presented the operator’s experiences with RCS.
• Both Kevin Klett (Acme Packet) and Micaela Giuhat (Genband) provided strong views on the implementation options for IMS and some hints on simplification.
• Katarina Sekaljic from Serbia Telekom presented on the challenges for implementing IMS.

We’re particularly looking forward to hearing more about Verizon’s presentation on VoLTE, as Simo Isomäki wrote a piece discussing how LTE is breathing new life into IMS and followed it up with a post on the voice problem. Simo believes that one of the key options for alleviating this pain point is VoLTE, as it is backed by all of the major network and device vendors. However, it requires an IMS back-end core and also forces all services using 2G/3G for voice to be re-implemented in IMS. VoLTE would support the handover of radio to ensure voice call continuity in a single-radio mode, but some work would still need to be done to stadardise the handover process from 3G to LTE.