Business Planning an MVNO, Travel SIM or Roaming IMSI product - free Webinar

 We are kicking off the end of 2023 with some free Webinars looking at the key issues facing the doing of Mobile Wholesale vs. the talking, some of them with live eSIMs for delegates (depending on location) so get enrolled today:

Business Plan & Business Planning and MVNO, MVNE, Travel SIM / Mobile Roaming Product

This is an online webinar, enroll at Eventbrite

MVNO Gold Rule #5 - Launch your MVNO with a single goal and stick with it, best one is Loyalty imo

So we have a new post and this is the first post which is based around a video, or a vlog, if you will, as opposed to some of the videos now being done adding to and updating some of the key posts. This one is a key one arising from a conversation with a customer, which hits on a question we have been analysing following going through CRM to see what makes an MVNO successful. Most of the key ones have had loyalty as the key. There are other factors to consider, especially as explained again and again here in these pages: the biggest enemy of the MVNO is not failure; it's never getting to market, and one of the key mistakes which can be made is choosing your systems around for example revenue generation and low cost, when you actual focus is customer loyalty!

If its about brand loyalty then chose your channels, partners and providers around this

So you can see from this diagram, from the very beginning an mvno needs to work out if it's going to be:

1.  premium or discount or 

2. whether it's doing an MVNO either for the revenue as a new revenue stream or it's doing it for the loyalty and 

Obviously these can change over time, and they do -  that's life, right? However life is a lot easier if you know what you're doing, or at least try to plan what you are doing in the beginning and you build your platform and your solution, and you choose your partners around this.

So an example being the two arrows that we have off to the left if you're going to be a discount operator then you may choose a customer service that's low cost which which is kind of at odds with you being premium but it may also impacts your ability to use this product as a revenue service because people probably will see this low-cost and then you won't necessarily contract happy customers and even as a loyalty product because this customer service that you choose may be at odds with how your customers want to be supported with regards to the rest of your business.

Then other things to think around that are for example the branding the marketing the pricing and your channels, so again, what I've seen happening in many MVNOs is that a big established company will decide: “right, I am going to be an mvno I will employ xy&z salesperson from mobile to make sure my mvno is a success as I have heard the worse thing in the world is a failed MVNO, right?” 

Wrong! if you are setting that up from a pure loyalty perspective then establishing the mvno in all the 3rd party channels is not a good idea because

a) it's a very expensive way to sell and 

b) it's going to place your product where all the competitors are and so 

c) you've just wasted a lot of money and commission on a channel, people and processes  that is at odds with the whole concept of your loyalty.

d) your cost of acquisition has just doubled or tripled the RoI

To give you an example, a supermarket mvno in the beginning made most of its sales via its own online channel on a Monday and Tuesday... This is not a coincidence, this is because people were shopping in that supermarket during the weekend and looked at their phones in their supermarket, and the ones that did not buy directly in the store decided to have a little look online to make sure it was a good deal, or just waste their time as customers have every right to do when making a purchase, and then went direct to the customer’s online store. 

Why would you then enable this large amount of customers, who have been into your store, then they have been onto your website, all in your colours, your brand, your flavour of how things are done... to then give them the option to further delay the purchase and go to one of the indirect channels where you are going to pay commission and there is a risk that you will lose that customer in the process, and the experience that customer experience is outside of your control and indeed the customer service post service is likely to be inferior, or at the very least different: It just does not make sense, however that is the situation I find myself in time and time again when launching an MVNO within a large organisation. 

Just because you don't have experience in mobile does not mean that as a successful business, having launched many different products and services in many different horizontals and verticals you should not ask, question, double question and then triple question: “why am I doing this in mobile?”:  Does it make sense or is it just because I've employed somebody who was in mobile and that's the way they did it for a product and a service that is in a completely different space on this diagram above.

At the end of the day, if its a brand play, mobile is all about brand loyalty...

These are all points that I've put here on this blog, but I covered differently in the vlog, sorry video so to get the full low down, experience The Full Monty the full hoo-ha the 360 the total immersive experience you need to check out the video as well as read this and you need to read this again probably after the video and then like comment subscribe hit the notification button if you liked it anyone more content like this … thanks!

 

NFV cloud MVNO conference 2015

Cloud NFV MVNO MVNE round table #MVNOIS 2015

As the first on some hopefully more views from the #MVNOIS conference 2015 in Nice, here is a quick note on the round table I was dragged onto by Informa due to having being building a fully cloud based NFV MVNE platform for the last few months. Google's project Fi has brought a lot of this to the forefront as global MVNOs and multi-national roaming require NFV and cloud MVNO.

NFV MVNOs and MVNEs making way for more disruptive, flexible, global / local mobile services

The round table was interestingly represented by HP (whose servers we incidentally used for our cloud NFV MVNE) Oracle (think Tekelec, ACME), Syniverse and Yaana, which gave us a very good panel of people in the industry in the security, law enforcement, hardware, software and cloud services space.

The most interesting outcomes were as follows:

NFV Cloud MVNO makes it easier and good for Global

One of the key take aways was the fact that NFV and Cloud makes it easier to roll-out and scale MVNOs and MVNEs nationally, and internationally. I can relate to having built international MVNOs and MVNEs - having to chose, MVNA / MVNE, full MVNO or Build Transfer Operate MVNO model from the beginning, possibly having to throw away one or more of the platforms and re-issue MVNO SIMs if you get it wrong is a big challenge. Similarly, so is global expansion: having to use one platform in one territory (e.g big/full) and another in another (e.g. small/MVNA) is just not good.  

NFV cloud essentially brings IT plus Telco together: good for LTE & WiFi

In the good old days you had to buy lost of boxes to run a mobile network, then lots of boxes to run a wi-fi network - if you wanted to make them work together, you needed more boxes, more integration... NFV Cloud lets and MVNO or MVNE run all / mots of its services on a virtual machine, as well as the wi-fi management. In pure LTE terms this means an radius and diameter on the same boxes, same network: think lower latency

NFV cloud MVNOs and the eSIM

Previously a lot of MVNOs got into trouble, if they were ill-advised, by not putting the right provisioning, activation, and SIM management processes in place from the start, which can be very costly as the MVNO grows: many believe a SIM costs less than a dollar, which it does in terms of the 'plastic', but the association of this SIM with a mobile core, OSS / BSS, CRM, BI, etc systems is at least ten fold if not more. An MVNO usually only orders a few hundred thousand SIMs max up front; eSIMs however, due to the large up-front volume, mean next generation MVNOs and MVNEs are having to look NFV and cloud based to be cost effective. Period.

NFV is more disruptive

NFV essentially separates out the hardware from the software, meaning that costs are contained, distributed, transparent and delivery / transition is simpler, quicker and as local / global as required

NFV is not pure cloud and still needs localisation

The biggest misconception that brings walls and heads together is the concept that you can run this anywhere: the truth is that a lot of it you can, and as we move to LTE and away from legacy signalling and media we will - but the truth of the matter is that certain services mean locality is essential: HLRs and HSSs often need to keep data protected in a certain area and GGSNs  / PG-Ws need localisation to avoid latency, then there are security, government intervention and other issues to consider. 

NFV is about standardised hardware

a common view / misconception about NFV is that its all virtual machine and cloud, but a key component is the ability to break out from the virtual environment on standardised hardware when necessary. A great example was from Oracle where they have had to break-out voice encoding into a standard non virtualised machine. We have found this with certain media drivers as well. The key here is that: you have all that is possible on a, for example HP server(s) but the voice encoding needs to go native: then you add another, in this case, HP box of similar specs, with more or less known specification, most likely the same drives, memory, SAN, etc. and have it running voice outside of NFV. 

Keep calm and #mvno_

That's all I have to say...

... wise words ...