Considerations for a Next Generation of Mediation – Balancing the Data Explosion with Revenue Monetisation

We’ve often discussed and debated the negative “scissor effect” phenomenon that operators are facing today when it comes to data services. In a nutshell, it’s the inverse relationship between growth in data traffic and decline in operators’ revenue.

There are several key factors that will drive data service growth in the coming years, which are contributing to broadening the gap, typically an improvement in network performance and growth in video services, growth in M2M-based business models and the move toward service convergence.

On a positive note, operators do not have a lack of data when it comes to subscribers, their usage transactions, network performance, cell-site information, device-level data, as well as data spread across their networks and back office systems. But will they have the innovation, know-how and drive to stitch the two together (data growth + subscriber & service awareness) to bridge the chasm being formed by declining revenues?

Often unappreciated, never given enough due but playing a pivotal role in the context of operator revenue monetisation strategies are next-generation data mediation platforms. These platforms will provide operators with the foundation to achieve true convergence and increase service velocity by rapidly introducing next-generation services and launching IP-based services that dramatically increase transactional volumes.

Old-fashioned, batch-oriented mediation platforms are gradually becoming archaic, and the need of the hour is real-time, scalable, flexible, network-driven, bi-directional, on-line and offline charging mediation platforms.

Scalability, processing performance and the ability to run on low-cost hardware are some of the key challenges that must also be addressed by these next-generation data mediation systems. In fact, next-generation data mediation platforms need a multitude of evolved and new capabilities ranging from being network, technology and vendor-agnostic, to supporting triggering and analytics.

Comptel Convergent Mediation supports system consolidation and mediation of all services through a total cost of ownership (TCO)-sensitive, single-platform approach. Regardless of whether end customers are prepaid or postpaid, it enables differentiation in highly competitive markets by offering a smooth evolution of the current network—and accompanying OSS/BSS environment—into a fully convergent solution, with best-of-breed, field-proven modules.

This blog post is based upon a recent Comptel-commissioned Heavy Reading whitepaper, “Balancing Act: Data Explosion vs. Revenue Monetisation – Considerations for a Next Generation of Mediation”.  Comptel would like to acknowledge Heavy Reading senior analyst Ari Banerjee for his role in the development of the content.

A New Form of Telecoms Convergence?

Convergence in telecoms is pretty old news. It no longer surprises us to see a mobile phone being used as a camera, a camcorder, a GPS, a music or video player…you name it—your mobile can do it. And not just in the communications sector—high-end cameras now record video, televisions and gaming consoles can browse the Internet…it seems like everything is turning into everything else. Then, just as you’re wondering if any form of technology convergence will ever surprise us again, well…let’s just say I witnessed a kind of convergence last week that took even me aback.

At TM Forum’s Team Action Week in Baltimore, a man was standing in a corner of the show floor, nothing unusual about that, except that he had a laptop wrapped around his head. At first, I thought maybe he was trying to hear if it was turned on, but no—this man was clearly having a conversation. Turned out he was on a call with a colleague using the laptop’s VoIP software; he kept his ear close to the speaker and his mouth close to the microphone nested in the screen’s hinge. This is a great example not just of the flexibility of modern devices, but of customers’ ingenuity, particularly when faced with high roaming charges, poor coverage or maybe just a dead battery in his phone. When all else failed, a two-kilo laptop and a Wi-Fi link saved the day.

PS: The man later admitted that a pair of earphones would have been helpful. Maybe he’d used them as shoe laces…