Intelligent networks

Telephia aims to arm wireless carriers with competitive information

The idea behind Telephia was straightforward enough when the company was founded in early 1998: provide wireless carriers with real-time data that would help them keep close track of subscriber market share so they could adapt their business strategies accordingly.

As the priorities of the wireless industry have expanded beyond the number of wireless voice customers, Telephia's own strategy has matured accordingly.

"The company was started to capitalize on a subscriber-counting technology," said John Oyler, president and co-founder of Telephia. "We've since expanded to offer everything companies in the wireless business might want to know."

To supplement its original market share offering, called Market~trac, Telephia developed applications that offer data on network performance, promotional and advertising activity, pricing structure and consumer perception in given markets across the industry. The company also created solutions to track wireless data services and network operation.

"Our vision is to create the standard for marketing intelligence and network performance intelligence for the wireless voice and data industry," said Alan Brune, Telephia's vice president of marketing.

Having access to that kind of information could prove crucial in a wireless sector increasingly focused on data and Internet applications. Criticism of wireless data during the past several years has not been limited to technological capabilities and the sluggish pace of application development - wireless carriers also have been called out for their inability to understand the needs of their customers and for their lack of understanding of wireless data marketing.

"People are either flying blind or trying to get the information themselves," Brune said.

One industry analyst who has followed Telephia's presence in the wireless voice realm said he believes it has a wide-open opportunity to extend its offerings into wireless data.

"I've been impressed with their capabilities on the voice side to fill a need not being filled either by the carriers themselves or by research firms - through their proprietary technology they can get access to levels of information others can't," said Bryan Prohm, senior analyst for Dataquest."If they can realistically extend that to the data world, they have a potential home run."

Telephia's additional products are designed to provide several different angles on the wireless market. Media~trac, for example, monitors the advertising and promotional creative approaches, activity and spending for different service providers, while Pricing~trac provides detailed information and analysis of different rate plans. E~trac, meanwhile, provides information on consumer attitudes and behavior collected from survey samples in different markets.

Telephia also expanded existing products such as NetQ, its network performance offering, to add mapping features and the capability to test data networks and services. For data services in particular, Telephia is concentrating its testing efforts on airports and other expected high-usage areas. For example, at October's PCIA GlobalXChange show in Chicago, Telephia used collected live data performance information from two Chicago-area wireless carriers (see figure).

"We're looking to do the testing in places people are most likely to use wireless data," Brune said.

Telephia's targeted customers - which include major national carriers such as AT&T Wireless and VoiceStream Wireless as well as handset manufacturers, Internet companies, utilities, tower companies and consultants - can opt to purchase targeted data or combine portions of Telephia's various offerings into a customized package."A lot of the information can be tied together to get at what carriers are really interested in," Oyler said.

Telephia's approach of conducting testing on competitive networks in different regions and selling the data collected back to the companies competing with one another raises the question of whether the information it provides is unique. The company maintains, however, that the breadth of data it can now gather addresses the issue of being able to provide original packages to various wireless competitors.

"There's a large enough sample that we're able to provide information to a lot of different carriers," Brune said."You're able to cut it different ways."