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<h4 style="text-align: justify;"><b>In the face of shrinking revenues and declining operating margins from their core communications services, mobile operators are rethinking their business models in pursuit of new sources of top line revenue growth.  Mobile carriers have access to unparalleled amounts of customer and network data, but they have never positioned themselves as value creators. If utilized intelligently and creatively, this data holds the key to an improved understanding of customer needs and preferences, and in a broader sense, the successful evolution of the role of operators at the centre of the mobile communications eco-system.</b></h4>
<h5 style="text-align: justify;"><b>What is Big Data for the operators?</b></h5>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Mobile operators are ‘natural’ Big Data companies, given they have a unique view into the behaviour and preferences of millions of customers by virtue of the network data that they process on a daily basis. Any activity which touches the wireless infrastructure - voice calls, data transmissions and app downloads - creates a digital footprint which can be analyzed and synthesized into valuable insights.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">And with the average daily ‘downtime’ of smartphones reduced to just four hours (as measured by global operator Teléfonica), it is clear that mobile devices are increasingly being embedded into the lives of the majority of users.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">As illustrated in the diagram below, this network data exists in a variety of forms. The decreasing cost of data storage and the availability of high performance computing applications now enables operators to create information-based offerings - not only for their own subscriber base, but also for third party organisations seeking a better understanding of their mobile users.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">Structured data is the accumulation of bulk transaction and profile records amassed by operators on a daily basis:</p>

<ul>
	<li>Itemized calling and messaging records - CDRs/xDRs</li>
	<li>Electronic data records - Web logs, searches</li>
	<li>Geo-positioning data records - Location coordinates, time, duration</li>
	<li>Billing profile records - Gender, age, address, spend</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Unstructured data is the detailed textual, numeric and graphical content transmitted between subscribers within the network</p>

<ul>
	<li>Social media posts</li>
	<li>Web browsing</li>
	<li>Media downloads and streams</li>
	<li>E-books and newsreader content</li>
	<li>App usage and interactions</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Inferred data comprises the patterns of behaviour derived from observed social media activity and point-to-point movements within the network service area</p>

<ul>
	<li>Social graph and influence graph - relationships, personal interests, attitudes, sentiments</li>
	<li>Location-based activity and context - retail footfall, travel dynamics, social preferences</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify;">With this wealth of data becoming accessible to operators, their attention is turning to the use of sophisticated big data analytics in order to drive internal initiatives - such as customer loyalty programmes and service personalization - as well as monetizing the latent value of this information with the development of new B2B offerings.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Subscriber data with this degree of specificity and richness has the potential to be a new asset class for operators.</p>

<h5 style="text-align: justify;"><b>How are the operators exploiting this opportunity?</b></h5>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The mobile operators with ‘smart’ capabilities such as dynamic network management, high performance computing and in-memory analytics have the potential to utilize these data assets to generate a holistic picture of which subscribers they should be targeting and which specific campaigns to launch - the so-called  ‘720-degree’ view of customers:</p>

<ul>
	<li>An internal, 360-degree view of their customers i.e. What are their product and service needs?; how and when and are they using the services?</li>
	<li>An external, 360-degree view of how they deploy the available services in their daily lives i.e. Where do they live, work and play? How may the customer experience be enhanced?</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This adds a powerful dimension to the market segmentation process, as well as informing the customer experience and campaign design programmes that flow from it. By knowing more about their subscriber base, operators can devise precise marketing messages that reach the right target customers, at the right time and most importantly in the right context.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The fusion of subscriber, network and social media data now will allow operators to perform their ‘business-as-usual’ processes more efficiently and effectively - defining new market segments, interacting dynamically with customers and channel partners and proactively addressing their individual demands.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In Indonesia, the GSM operator AXIS has been successful in refining its customer segmentation model through the analysis of subscriber information accumulated from the self-care portal ‘AXIS Net’. In turn, this initiative has enabled AXIS to stratify the subscriber base into eighteen micro segments, which are targeted selectively with specific marketing promotions.</p>
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<h5 style="text-align: justify;"><b>What are the new revenue sources from Big Data?</b></h5>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The market environment that operators now have to compete in is an ecosystem that is very different to when they launched. They are confronting a new breed of competitors resulting from convergence, where lines blur and companies diversify outside of their original markets. Intense competition and commoditization of communications services are driving increased network traffic and usage, but it is the OTT messaging providers who are capturing the imagination of the consumer market and taking increasing revenue share.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In order to play in this newly-emerging eco-system, mobile operators are pursuing new lines of business that have the potential both to monetize the value of their data assets and to establish the position of the operators as a critical player in these markets:</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;"><b>Customer insights</b> - aggregated and anonymized mobile subscriber data has extreme value for a wide array of commercial and public services organisations: retailers (store location planning, campaign design), local government administrations (urban planning), advertising companies (outdoor media mapping), sports and entertainment venues (audience profiling).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><b>Data hosting</b> - by virtue of their service provider legacy, strict regulatory framework and data protection obligations, the mobile operators have developed very strong trust relationships with consumers and businesses alike. This opens up the prospect of operators utilising their data assets in order to host security and authentication-based services on behalf of financial institutions, government agencies and e-commerce companies. Identity management, access control and user authentication are all part of the service portfolios being developed by the leading US and European operators.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><b>Third party applications</b> - rather than viewing companies which provide digital services over the network as competitors, increasingly operators are seeing them as business partners. In principle, any service that requires a set of enabling utilities such as customer billing, problem resolution, security and authentication services can be interfaced directly with the host systems and databases in the mobile operator environment. The demand for these hard-wired services will grow rapidly as e-commerce, mobile healthcare and machine-to-machine (M2M) applications become ubiquitous.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The mobile operators therefore have the opportunity to create a “two-sided” business model, whereby they leverage their unique assets - subscriber data and subscriber trust - firstly, to create more intimate relationships with their existing subscribers and secondly, to form strategic partnerships with both commercial and governmental organisations underpinned by a new portfolio of services based on privacy, trust and security.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Executed well, this will reassert the central position of the operators in the mobile communication eco-system.</p>
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