Ashwin Jaiswal

Head -IT Business Consulting

Telecom, Media & Entertainment Practice
Reliance Communication, India




Managing
The Transition..
With Care and Sensitivity


Huge Demand, Huge Challenges
Voice Revenue Saturating : Need to Control Costs, Manage Bottom-line
Mobile Broadband driving growth. Traffic is doubling in 9 months. Already
up 131 % than last year.
Network enhancement cannot be infinite. Only 20 % Capacity getting
added every year .
Mobile Video is a killer App ! And also The Data streams are NO Longer
Burty. To accommodate : Needs Rounded response
To Survive : Look for new means of Revenue increase
To face the biggest Danger ever OTT s : Create value for Customers
To Reduce Churn : Aggressively Re-engage with Subscribers, Provide
personalization, service choices, usage & spend options



Unique Disagreement !
All Operators across the Globe agree that
Challenges are more or less exactly similar
Bandwidth is a scarce resource
Mobile Data is the really Killer App !
And it needs differential charging

And if we donot do that fairly quickly, we are running a great risks to
our network and our overall servicing ability

But widely disagree on the Best way to Price, bill or Charge for it !




Key Drivers !
The Generation Next : Increasing heavy Internet users
The Unprecedented surge in the Mobile Internet
Devices
The Huge demand generated by Internet Applications
and Content.
IMS not coming to its age as anticipated earlier
Mobile Application revolution got focused on the
Smart phone vendors, social networking sites
coupled with application providers like AppStore



The Focus of Indian Telcos
Convergent services driving convergence of bss and oss QoS
The need of service differentiation in competitive market
Managing customer experience and improving stickiness
Managing third party content and applications
Maximizing N/w and service resources
Being 97 % prepaid Market, Continuous engagement & dynamic
experiments on Tiered pricing models by Telcos with Price
Sensitive large customer base .


The Tiered Pricing Indian Scenario !
Simultaneous growth of Retail & Airline Boom in India along with
latest mobile revolution, fairly quickly, Indian Customers have got
used to various tiered pricing Model.
The Unlimited usages have never settled down in India long
enough, and before it could do so, Telcos had already started
applying tiered pricing
Although the demand still exists, Telcos have been successful in
using a very well understood Airline / Hotel Pricing Model to their
subscribers.
The smart phones still forms only about 8% of the overall Device
sales. And the segment is at the upper most strata of the
demographics which is not so price sensitive.
The sensitive handling of this limited have been easier, smooth and
effective.
The acceptance is percolating down well to the lower segments.


Indian Telcos Response !
The Indian telcos have been quick to realize that IMS may take time
to mature & Defocused on it quickly for the time being.
Concentrated fully on managing Data Demand and arresting
Network congestion
Policy Control and Charging mechanisms have been deployed or
under deployment in most telcos, when Data Usage is still under
control.
The pricing variants are already rolled out in top 5 telcos, ensuring
expectation setting for future as well as testing waters.
Since the quantum of Customer Base is still small yet, significant
investment on managing Customers Experience for the tiered
pricing.



Blackberry Helped; 3 G Pricing Made the
Difference!
An aggressive engagement with customers continued soon after
the Blackberry launch.
The already existing Customer segmentation has been quickly
extended to Proactively managing the Data usage tiered pricing.
Special cells have been created by Important telcos to drive the
differential pricing Models to identified customers.
Due to its high entry costs for BBsUnlimited Data usage, Telcos
had already rolled out tiered pricing with BB, even on Prepaid
AT & T Apple experience, ( Apple came quite late to India,) was
smartly used by Telcos as setting the house in Order.
Delayed 3-G roll out in India, clearly set segments & tiered Pricing
Tese 3 experiences ,helped Indian Telcos test waters with Policy
controls & differential charging mechanism before deploying solns


Known Approach but Unique Customer
Response!
Policy Control and Charging mechanisms have been deployed or
under deployment in most telcos, when Data Usage is still under
control.
Due to Huge Prepaid Base, Going Beyond the normal trend of
Usage based Pricing, now Telcos have adopted tiered pricing on
various fronts : ( This is only going to grow further)
Specific Application based pricing Positive lists
Specific Plans for Data hungry Websites
Specific Devises Based policies
Access Location based pricing & policies
The pricing variants are already rolled out in top 5 telcos, ensuring
expectation setting for future as well as testing waters.
Since the quantum of Customer Base is still small yet, significant
investment on managing Customers Experience for the tiered
pricing.

Customer Acceptance - Phenomenal
While these Policy control and differential charging mechanism are
still in nascent stage, the customer acceptance have been
phenomenal due to constant engagement by telcos with them
The prepaid subscription model coupled with event based charging
model over the years have made customers well ware of
differential access pricing.
The resistance have been very low more so because the usage
pricing is still one of the lowest in the world.
Engagement & constant communication greatly helped and will
continue to help
In one of the surveys, the India cultural angle of being caring &
taking care of helps the acceptance further.



Thank You !


Ashwin.jaiswal@Relianceada.com,
acjaiswal@hotmail.com
+91 93 222 222 93