Wireless providers need to focus on the overall ‘subscriber experience’: Walter

TORONTO—Wireless providers need to focus on the overall “subscriber experience” to retain and build their customer bases, Juergen Walter, head of business solutions with Nokia Siemens Networks, said at the 2010 Canadian Telecom Summit conference Monday. Juergen said that “quality of service” is now the number one factor wireless subscribers cite for staying with their providers. “Quality, rather than cost of billing or customer care, has become the most important retention mark,” Walter said. “Subscriber experience has now become the top business goal of our customers.” Walter said telecom providers must learn to anticipate their customers’ needs to meet ever-increasing expectations of what they want out of a high-speed network. As consumer expectations increase, so too will the exponential growth in data usage on the networks around the world, experts said at the conference. Mark Henderson, president and CEO of Ericsson Canada, said in a keynote address that it’s expected there will be eight billion mobile subscriptions by 2015. In India alone, there are 17 million new mobile subscribers every month. He added that Canada has about 22 million wireless subscribers. “ they are doing in 45 days what we have done in 25 years,” Henderson said. Machine-to-machine wireless connections are also expected to grow exponentially over the next 10 years. Henderson said that conservative estimates say 50 billion devices will be connected wirelessly by 2020. In Canada, that would mean that 220 million devices connected to the country’s wireless networks. “We’ll live in a society where virtually everything is connected,” Henderson said. Wired broadband networks, which can offer much more bandwidth than their wireless cousins, will need to prepare for an exponential growth in demand and consumer expectations, experts said. At a panel called “Access and Beyond: Next Generation Networks,” executives from several companies that build and maintain network infrastructure discussed the sea change brought about by new applications and the “everything all the time” expectations of a new generation. Demand for online video content has grown by 140 per cent in the past year, said panellist Steve Waszak, president and CEO of BTI Systems, a network infrastructure company that provides solutions for the middle mile of network connectivity. “I’ve seen that anywhere from 70 per cent to maybe as much as 90 per cent of the traffic on networks will be video- and media-based by 2013,” Waszak said. John Piercy, CEO of Atria Networks, a company that owns and operates fibre optic networks in Ontario, said applications are driving the need for more bandwidth. “Applications and converged services are driving bandwidth needs higher and higher,” Piercy said. “And not just bandwidth, but the need for secure bandwidth . Security had become a much bigger issue than it was in the past.” Piercy added that a greater reliance on cloud computing is increasing the need for higher data speed requirements. Waszak said content management technologies are necessary to deal with the large influx of media content travelling through networks at an ever-increasing pace. “We’ve taken what we think are transport pipes, or what we call dumb pipes, and we’ve put a brain into those pipes. In addition to the brain, we now have some storage capacity and some applications that manage the media on those networks,” Waszak said. “By putting brains into these pipes, we’ve been able to provide some compelling results for our carriers in terms of how they manage this overlay of data that is coming on the networks today.” Mark Evans, with the consulting firm ME Consulting, moderated a panel titled “Business Models 3.0,” which explored the financial implications surrounding content and carriage. He said the number of total YouTube streams has doubled from 1 billion to 2 billion since October 2009. Google continues to lose money with the popular video service because of the high cost of providing it and the low return on advertising. David Purdy, president and general manager of television products with Rogers Communications Inc., also took part in the panel, and said that customers want access to premium content anywhere, at any time, and on any device. But he said that the niche, amateur content that dominates YouTube is difficult to monetize. “It’s the long-tail niche content—so the cat’s riding skateboards and the guy who got gored by a bull last week—that content, I don’t know who owns it.” Purdy said there is a viable business model to provide professional content online that would be tied to existing subscriptions with providers. Rogers has undertaken such a model with its online video-on-demand service available to Rogers subscribers. He added that using Rogers’ centralized content distribution network could cut down on peer-to-peer congestion on the network by providing a legal alternative to watch content. “Part of the business case is that we’re doing it to reduce peer-to-peer traffic,” Purdy said. “Not by shutting it down, but by providing a better alternative.” jmigneault@thewirereport.ca

Wireless providers need to focus on the overall ‘subscriber experience’: Walter

Broadcast | June 7, 2010

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