Monetising network investments in broadband infrastructure is a top priority for communications service providers (CSPs) in Asia–Pacific (APAC) in 2015. CSPs in developed Asia–Pacific (DVAP) countries focus on retaining their customers by offering multi-play, multi-screen, cloud and enterprise services. However, CSPs in emerging Asia–Pacific (EMAP) countries focus on acquiring new customers, as well as providing more services to their current customers. Operations and billing support systems (OSS and BSS) enable CSPs to fulfil the end users’ service needs by using their network assets effectively and transforming their operations to deliver their business objectives.
CSPs need to monetise their broadband investments and prepare for digital services over virtualised networks
LTE has stimulated data usage in APAC and, as a result, spending on mobile data services has increased. CSPs now offer other services to drive revenue growth, including bundling services such as multi-screen, video and fixed broadband. CSPs in APAC must also establish a strong strategic response to over-the-top (OTT) messaging and voice threats to help minimise further disruption to legacy revenue streams. Digital economy services are being planned and launched, and these will create the basis for revenue growth in 2017 and beyond. Digital economy services will be driven by cloud computing, m-commerce, utilities and m-health services.
CSPs are starting to deploy virtualised network solutions and the earliest deployments in APAC involve hybrid cloud solutions. The increased agility and openness of cloud computing, network function virtualisation (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) provide the potential to reduce the time required to launch new services, but it is essential to implement orchestration and automation in the OSS and BSS to realise this service agility.
CSPs need policy-controlled automation of service delivery and end-to-end visibility of their network and operations
CSPs in APAC are now providing premium content for high-value users, and popular content for other customers. In order to provide personalised, differentiated services to users based on the customer lifetime value (including multi-play bundles, as well as multi-screen and real-time offers), CSPs need to implement several new functions in their OSS and BSS, including:
- access to customer, device and network analytics in order to obtain a total view of customers, including their preferences and service usage
- customer experience management strategies that relate to linking network and operational metrics to a customer experience index and Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- service quality assurance conducted by the service operation centre (SOC) to provide end-to-end visibility and focused, automated optimisation mechanisms
- omni channel customer care, including self care and social media as a channel to their current operations
- multi-play service bundling, service creation for providing real-time offers for simple services supported by a unified inventory
- policy control and converged, real-time charging.
In the future, CSPs will provide and enable value-added digital economy services over virtualised networks. Software control will provide the agility to enable new services at lower costs. Incremental changes and transformations that CSPs introduce will need to have a blueprint to cover virtualisation and digital economy services in the future.
