Mobile Operators, like other businesses, face constant profitability challenges.
Solutions like reducing costs, overhead, and employing technology to make things leaner and cheaper can be used but ultimately, the law of diminishing returns apply. The challenge can also be met by increasing the size of the business, being more competitive and increasing market share, yet still this will be limited by the competition and regulation.
New markets with new customers bring the possibility of increasing profitable revenue. For this, the Mobile Operator would need to have something distinctive to effectively compete in the domain.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a domain that provides an opportunity, and a whole range of new potential customers, for Mobile Operators. The IoT is an enormous area, covering many existing industries, each with their own ecosystem. Each industry has their own history and legacy which affects the technology choices, business procedures, price points, and service expectations.
The challenge then is selecting a segment within the IoT for mobile operators, given what Mobile Operators do well. Let’s consider what Mobile Operators offer and what they are good at:
- Spectrum: Mobile Operators have access to licensed Spectrum. This is important for IoT because the investment levels are high and the service lives are very long. Alternative wireless solutions that use Unlicensed spectrum are vulnerable, the spectrum can be congested and there is no legal redress to cover investment loss.
- Network: Mobile Operators have the network and can decide which parts of a territory to cover. This puts them in a good position when making offerings for IoT customers and substantially differentiates them from other IoT Application Providers.
- Technology: Recently, there have been some fundamental advances for Licensed Radio Technology. At the Low Power, High Latency level we have seen the introduction of Narrowband IoT (NB-IOT) and Long-Term Evolution Machine Type Communication (LTE-M). NB-IOT and LTE-M can be used for devices with very long battery lives, located in remote places like basements or outlying suburbs. At the High Power, Low Latency level there has been a huge increase in bandwidth and reduced latency which is enabling streaming and fast response services.
- Scale: IoT solutions at scale is an area where Mobile Operators are well placed. Operators are accustomed to scale, tens of millions of end points are not a challenge and the logistics of operating at this level of scale are table-stakes.
- Integration: Operators are good at integrating systems. This comes from years of experience of networks, operations, billing, work force management, care center, contact portals etc... Solutions for IoT are often composed of a variety of different elements to fit the different use cases.
- Customer Management: Operators are good with dealing with customer at volume and are confident of using omni-channel contact centers to realize this. IoT services have similar challenges, although the end customer may be an Enterprise, often there are consumers that are impacted by the IoT service and need to be managed in a similar way to Mobile Operator Consumers.
- Billing: Billing along with charging, rating and accounting are a fundamental part of a Mobile Operators business. This is no different in the IoT. When a consumer customer is using the IoT service then Billing the customer is also important. If it is a simple monthly bill, then Mobile Operators are well placed to provide this service.
- Trust: Mobile Operators are often very well known in the region they service; frequent contact with consumers, enterprises and political institutions this level of trust would be extended in the IoT services as well.
Given this distinctive competence, Mobile Operators should select IoT industries and applications that they are likely to succeed in.
For a trusted Mobile Operator, rolling out a multi-million-dollar IoT solution, such as metering, would mean connecting a very large number of battery powered endpoints across a nation or region would:
- Utilize License Spectrum to ensure coverage for the lifetime of the service.
- Require a network that covers enough of the region to be able to connect to the endpoints.
- Employ optimal technology for battery performance and reachability.
- Grow the service over time to the scale needed.
- Integrate the solution with Contact Center, Billing, Work Force Management and other elements to realize a complete and effective solution.
- Employ the Customer Management capabilities, such as Call Centers, in order to accommodate customer information and their issues in relation to the services.
- Repurpose their Billing Services to bill customer utility usage.
The utilities use-case matches nicely with these operator strengths, but there are also other services, like the Smart City segment.
The Motive IMPACT IoT platform can be used as a key component in a Mobile Operator offering. With particular strength in the Cellular Low Power space mobile, operators can increase their average revenue per connection by up to ten-fold. IMPACT IoT is often used for both Device Management and Data Collection on constrained devices to manage the complete lifecycle while using the same constrained connection to collect data and perform streaming analytics in real time. Data can be used for multiple use cases such as Asset Management, Billing, Reconciliation, Meter Data Management and Predictive Maintenance.
Motive IMPACT IoT Platform is performance optimized meaning that non constrained and high performant devices can benefit with resource controlled throughput ensuring that solutions can address critical IoT in a cost effective way.
Motive IMPACT IoT is just one part of the integrated Motive IoT portfolio which also includes highly rated and widely deployed Home Device Management, Service Management and iSIM Management. Learn more.