For Jason Keane, the head of Portfolio Business and Operations Support Systems at Ericsson, the immediate future is all about telcos learning to sweat their spectrum assets more effectively. Doing so allows them to maximise the sunk value of spectrum investments and pursue a long and winding road of incremental revenue advances. That takes in old ladies’ installations of doorbell cams with minimised friction to enabling Taylor Swift concert-goers with guaranteed connectivity.
Critically, none of this happens manually and none of this is billed for monthly. Autonomous networks mean these sorts of apps can be provisioned and billed for and operators can reap the benefits. “Spectrum is finite and expensive so operators need to sweat that asset and exploit as much as they can,” says Keane. “If you want to do programmatic exposure my question is what role does OSS/BSS play in maximising that spectrum?”
Keane cites Ericsson’s operator customers and their partners who are looking to utilise cellular connections to drive revenues. He sees off-peak use cases enabling spectrum asset values to be sweated so IoT devices, for example, might choose to communicate in the middle of the night when network utilisation is low. Previously off-limits use cases such as placing embedded SIMs (eSIMs) in doorbells or household appliances are used to simplify and improve the user experience.
Taylored swiftly
That missing US$20 can be generated from venue owners if a blue-chip telco provides connectivity to Taylor Swift event attendees in the same way that an enterprise might instantiate a service to shift an AI workload or batch communicate data from IoT devices. It’s about simultaneously creating new revenue-generating offerings and turning inefficiently monetised opportunities into automatically optimised contributors to the bottom line.
This might take a previously cumbersome-to-connect service into a fully-automated experience and critically for operators enables them to derive revenue from previously unaddressable segments. This game is all about creating incremental revenues from a raft of apps and use cases and enabling payment for these in real-time. The 60-day cycle of totting up carrier billings is ending as the cost of the network in infrastructure investment terms becomes further decoupled from the value of the service provided.
“If I, as an operator, make it frictionless for my mother to connect a doorbell camera, that’s the value,” adds Keane. “The value in all of these types of use cases is in making the consumer happy. From the OSS layer it’s about programmatic exposure while at the BSS layer it’s about whether you’re easy to do business with.”
Telco apps must enable programmatic exposure so new services can be delivered but also they must be fundamentally be easy for everyone from doorbell makers to venue owners to interact with and share revenues. The concept of an enterprise customer having an AI machine that requests a network function from an operator’s customer – and the request is allowed and billed for in real-time – is the terrain the telecoms industry is moving into. It’s a stark contrast to previous iterations and it is reliant on the dual approach of enabling technology coupled with appealing collaboration scenarios.
“We already have spot pricing based on demand so why can’t telcos use that to sweat their spectrum assets,” asks Keane. “We can charge based on the demand coming in. That’s a much different way to think and what we have today is the tooling to move closer towards that.” Keane takes his excitement about telcos’ growing prospects to monetise their infrastructure and sweat their spectrum based on demand levels with caution. There are a series of steps to take that need to be carefully executed upon in telcos’ complex new dance. “If you spend money on a radio access network (RAN) you need to make money,” he confirms. “The industry doesn’t lack technology now and there are no silver bullet use cases. Money can be made by selling differentiated experiences and making payments [for these] instant.”
George Malim