Telcordia mobile survey: Something’s gotta give

There was evidence this week that operators are really rethinking business models and billing strategies. Deutsche Telekom talked of iPhone offloads to Wi-Fi, and Verizon talked of offering “buckets of data by the megabyte” with its impending LTE offerings.

These announcements reflect findings released this week by Telcordia, which conducted a survey of 500 telecom executives attending Mobile World Congress and CTIA. In the survey, most telecom executives predictably said today’s flat-rate models are not sustainable, however, not so predictably, 73% indicated mobile broadband strategies would be as much a marketing issue as a network issue. “As much as operators want to manage traffic, they don’t want to inhibit people from doing what they want to on their networks,” said Pat McCarthy, vice president of global marketing for Telcordia service delivery solutions. In the survey, McCarthy noticed a shift from focusing on volumes to focusing more on the perception of value. “We found that marketing executives want to make ‘peak hours’ an opportunity for generating more revenue, as opposed to just capping usage.”

He noted that in the survey, executives recognized that “connected devices” would go beyond PCs and modems and onto everything from dog collars to appliances. “With so many devices and demands for bandwidth, they want ‘on-the-fly’ policy management that allows customers to opt into more bandwidth or features once they hit limits … to upgrade, for example, to a hi-def plan or premium plan or mega sports plan on the fly,” McCarthy said.

For these reasons, Telcordia this month has pushed hard the message that operators will move toward tiered services and concrete limits, or a combination of both, to manage data traffic.

“We believe that to attract and keep more profitable customers, operators need more throughput on their networks, which already is driving RFIs for policy management that better manages QOS levels and SLAs,” McCarthy said.