Telco

Revenue streams in telecommunication

The telco market is often considered to be the first to reflect new market trends. Network operators provide very detailed data about customers’ location, their behaviors and needs. However, the convoluted structure of existing solutions, as well as technical, cultural and organisational boundaries between IT and network departments, prevent sufficient leverage of this information for business purposes. 

The telecom operators have gone through three waves of revenue streams. The 1st wave was related to voice services, the 2nd wave was connected with messaging services (SMS/MMS) revenues and the 3rd wave, circa 2007, is connected with mobile data services and their revenue, that added up to falling incomes from the first two waves.

Now, from 2013 onwards, total revenues of telecoms are in decline in most mature markets.
There is a market consensus that telecom operators need to build the 4th wave of income, that need to:

  • “understand” and relate to the real-time context of their user; 
  • integrate with and leverage Internet services; 
  • go beyond simple communications applications.
Gladly. 2018 Customer Service Expectations Report
Gladly. 2018 Customer Service Expectations Report

Real-time data analysis

The main challenge of telecom operators is a lack of processing logic, such as analysis of data sources and business rules. They also have significant issues with implementing them in the traditional IT/Network/Business internal environment. Moreover, due to a difficult financial situation, the management boards have typically put capital-intensive transformation projects on hold. 

Telcos will also play a strategic role in building the Internet of Things (IoT), which can become one of the revenue sources in the new era. However, one of the main issues that telecom operators have with this approach is a very low level of revenue-per-SIM. Retixa helps to solve this problem by enabling operators to provide much higher value (real-time analytics and control) to their partners than just connectivity. With this approach, SIM cards can be offered for free and the partners can be charged for services with value add much higher than only connectivity.