An Idea for CSPs: Reduce Churn by Getting Closer to Business Customers
One of the most discussed topics among mobile telecom professionals is how to reduce churn and increase ARPU. Steady trends of sinking revenues from voice services and the lack of next generation killer app make those discussions even more important for service providers success. Different opinions are shared like new product development, quality of network, services, customer care, etc. Some strategies are based on price competition and constant improvement of operations efficiency, others rely on new but still uninvented data services and products.
Decrease Churn, Increase Loyalty with Personal Multimedia VAS
If you are a communication service provider looking to increase customer loyalty and decrease churn, iMediaShare Center might be an interesting user-centric VAS to check out.
The service has two characteristics that make it particularly suitable for the job:
- The users start storing personal image and video with the operator which makes the relationship operator-subscriber much more personal;
- The VAS increases the footprint of the operator to reach to the subscriber’s home WiFi network thus bridging the mobile and home worlds.
The Future of Mobile Messaging
Last week I visited “The Future of Mobile Messaging” – a great conference about mobile messaging in today’s world. It was amazing how entrepreneurs, telecom experts, marketing professionals and other active people in mobile world unified around the idea that the future of mobile messaging for consumers more or less belongs to the social media. Almost every single speaker was referring to Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn as an opportunity to launch the next kind-of killer service that will increase ARPU.
T-Mobile for example presented two handsets with entirely reshaped idle screen through which one can browse in a fancy way all contacts merged between handset’s phone book and the Facebook account. She could see their status, latest wall posts and even call them with just a single click without the need to start any kind of application – it is just there, the first thing you see when the handset is switched on. The service is only available to T-Mobile subscribers and most importantly – it is totally free. T-Mobile demonstrated a great market differentiation for the young audience and it will definitely rock the market.
Mobicents 2.0 Is Knocking on the Door
Mobicents team did a great job and yesterday released BETA 1 of the new Mobicents JAIN SLEE release 2.0.0. All JAIN SLEE open source community was waiting for it long long time and it seems very soon it will be officially released.
Even though the full compliance with JAIN SLEE 1.1 is the major goal for the release the team has very aggressive plans to introduce multiple other improvements into the code base. And according to the release notes I bet they are firmly committed to close successfully all the activities. With BETA 1 Mobicents is upgraded to JBoss AS 5 and its internal caching mechanism is migrated to JBoss Cache 3.
The overall performance of 2.x seems to be much better than 1.2 and BETA 2 is expected to bring the telco critical features of fault tolerance and high availability. I hope it will be really soon and shortly after that the 2.0 GA be released.
