Operators take a variety of approaches to monetizing 4G

How will mobile operators make money on 4G? About 52 percent of providers plan to offer tiered packages while 46.7 percent will be offering casual one-time offers such as day or month passes -- this according to new research sponsored by relationship management company Convergys. Less than a quarter are considering an advertising funded model.

The challenge for operators is that yesterday’s BSS platforms will not be able to handle the real time, dynamic transactional environments of 4G. Monolithic, offline billing platforms must give way to real-time transaction management systems. Even many current BSS solutions lack the flexibility and scalability to support the wide range of choices open to operators.

Morag Lucey, global senior vice president of marketing Convergys said that operators must pour money into new infrastructure to meet growing bandwidth demands, as well as launch new products, generate new revenue streams, and perform flawlessly. The need for real time is paramount, according to Lucey.

According to Michelle Nowak, global head of strategy, solutions and marketing for the cable, broadband and satellite market sectors at Convergys, business models will depend on a fundamental back-office choices operators must make. There is no doubt that legacy systems cannot cope with complex rating or re-rating but the choice for operators is more complicated than simply ‘ripping and replacing’ old systems. With shorter and shorter periods in which to achieve a return on investment and the risks involved in major IT projects a ‘solve and evolve’ approach may fit better with an overall corporate culture. The level of change and the extent to which real time solutions are implemented will also depend on whether operators’ first objective is to monetize new services or to increase the ‘stickiness’ of their offerings and focus on customer loyalty first.

Either way, the study proposes four key ingredients to meet core business objectives essential to eventual 4G service monetization. Familiar as they are, the four are: 1) real time transaction management and integrated product catalog to reduce time to market; 2) automation and embedded analytics to control costs; 3) policy management; and 4) convergent architectures to improve the customer experience and scalability to manage high traffic volumes and the pressures of wholesale billing.

With the BSS trends leaning heavily towards personalization and the 4G world promising the rich environment necessary to make the most of the combination of content and customer data, real time seems to be essential, whether the legacy stays or goes.