MVNO Event Series Interview Growth Areas, Challenges for MVNO in 2017

Q: Tell us about yourself and your position at Conecto?

I am Christian Borrman, CEO of Conecto, Conecto is an MVNE in the UK and US, originally also in Mexico. Conecto provide flexible and scalable solutions for MVNOs notice of all sizes.

Q: what is the current state of the MVNO Market?

The MVNO market has hit a bit of a plateau in there are lots of people trying to do things however the lot of people who have found the present solutions are either not scalable or that they're too limiting, or if they started in one sense (i.e MVNE vs. MVNA)  then they may have to throw that all away and start again (if they grow) or they have to risk and start very big and probably never gets that size they expected.

Conecto provide a solution that lets them start very small and grow as big as they want or need , and if at some point the MVNO wants to buy out of that solution the MVNO can (and still stay with the same APIs, CRM, and other systems). We have seen that a lot of players are actually looking at our Conecto model is a way to go forward with  and MVNO model they have been investigating for a while as well as existing MVNOs they have just not been able to scale, and  move forward where the MVNO was not moving forward before.  

Another big issue has been a lot of consultation with the network operators which has effectively just made it a lot more difficult to get a wholesale agreement that people (MVNOs) necessarily want. This consolidation is a period that has lasted now for about 2 years and I think we're coming out of that finally,  and so this should make things a lot easier (with no MVNO competition a competitive wholesale deal is very difficult) and so we should be seeing a lot of next generation MVNEs and MVNOs taking advantage of cloud MVNE flexibility, and taking advantage of the renewed appetite of wholesale operators for MVNOs (post consolidation or no consolidation) and as such we should see a renewed growth in MVNOs in the coming months and years.

Q: Where do you see new opportunities in the MVNO market?

Well I am probably not the best person to ask because we spent a lot of time in Mexico where in 2015/2016 that was where there was supposed to be the next big growth area (and we acted upon) which it wasn't for various reasons that we won't go into... What we have seen on a practical note that there is a lot of untapped opportunity in the US and in the UK and some extent in Europe and that is then moving in the next year or so, as I see it, to Africa and the Middle East being the next big growth areas that we certainly have on our radar and (is evident in terms of opportunities) on our CRM system, and for me are upcoming opportunities.

Q: In what region do you see the biggest growth for MVNO?

I still think there is a lot nascent growth in Europe and the US, there is just a lot of people who do not have solutions to their problems or the solutions they want to their problems from the existing players (...and many of these players have left the market) and we have seen situations such as Audi buying an (going to the extent of buying an) MVNE (a company just does not buy a provider / solution they are happy with in normal market conditions). We are see a lot of big players

Airlines and and car manufacturers either creating their own Solutions, buying their own Solutions or coming to companies like Conecto with Next Generation Solutions and there's a lot of untapped growth there which may or may not come to fruition in the next year or so.  In a slightly more mid to longer term I think Africa and the Middle East are growth areas, and the LATAM area can grow again but there are serious issues in terms of competition and regulation that need to be overcome.

Q: Why should MVNOs attend our events?

As I have said a few times I think it's the key area where people can come together, twice a year for the International Events and at least once a year for the Regional events. It's very difficult to meet people from all around the world, and sometimes it's difficult to even arrange meetings (with key partners, let alone) see everybody in one place. For such a niche market you need to have an excuse and a place to go, and this is the place where I get to meet everybody in the industry in one place and have back to back meetings without distractions of needing to solve this problem all that problem which of the end of the day, mobile as a complex business and there's always things delaying and putting meetings off so, if you have an excuse to congregate somewhere X times a year, then that is the (one time) when you can get a lot achieved.

Come and meet Conecto at the Acropolis Nice, 24-27 April 2017

MVNO World Congress 2015 Pre Conference Workshop Part 2 - MVNO Data

2015 PRE CONFERENCE WORKSHOP - MVNO Data

Following up on the post 2016 MVNO World Congress  on the 2015 pre conference workshop, we have part 2, following Part 1 Mobile Marketing

Data is hard for MVNOs to sell effectively, as there are many hurdles, but good loyalty and revenue rewards those that do.

The biggest hurdle for any new MVNO is overcoming the same issue of the previous section on marketing: its the schizophrenic frankenstein approach. 

Your data package will vary if you are pre-pay, postpay or with an MVNO on MNO

The reality is that data bundles vary substantially if you are with an MNO, MVNO, prepaid or postpaid, and as such an MVNO data should vary. In reality, most pre-pay and MVNO customer s I have access to data for, use a lot less data than their postpaid counterparts, and there is a reason for this: if you are being charged for more data than you use, you will tend to learn to "abuse" data, whereas is you pay for what you use you tend to be more frugal.

Don't do it!

The is also a strange dichotomy whereby while mobile data requirements are going up on the one hand, wifi offload, wifi coverage, wifi speed and availability is also going up and giving way to "snacking" whereby frugal, light and moderate use of pay for what you use data at a premium price, can still be cheaper than "supersize" bundles that are throttled at some point anyway.

The second big issue for MVNOs is data configuration. We have been doing OTA APN data configuration specifically for MVNOs longer than anybody at Virtuser and know the pitfalls, especially when i comes to user experience, as we started out enabling apps for Nokia with their PR and Marketing agencies in 2006, and it was critical that the user experience was right.

Get the user experience for data for MVNOs wrong and it will be a disaster no matter what the bundle, package or need!

You need to get data working in as few clicks possible, and with a uniform as possible experience across all devices to a) keep customers, and b) minimise failures, but most of all c) minimise customer support; which is both a cost and a terrible customer experience in one.

Too many steps to configure data means too many points for failure, terrible customer experience and an unhappy customer

Above is the experience of the same ex MVNO with one service, and below with another... guess which one is ours and which is more effective :)

Simple data configuration is key to an MVNO

Apart from a bit of a plug of a service we spent 5 years developing to get right, the key is to remember than MNOs have this done automatically and so you, and an MVNO, are already starting with a disadvantage in terms of pain of adoption: keep it simple and get it right...

On top of this I would add the element of looking at wifi to complement your business, as the MNOs have done as well. In the long run it will keep your MNO happy, as:

1.  you do not want to have the discussion with your MNO at the monthly operational meeting where X% of the MNO's network data hoggers are on your MVNO: just trust me on this one!
2. keep the network, service and price for people prepared to pay for what they use and you are able to allow them to get what they pay for, which keeps the pressure on cost down.
3. nothing is more "cannibalising" to an MNO than points 1. and 2. above!
4. data can have the highest utilisation of any bundles if you get the product / price / positioning wrong

I have not covered all the points of the workshop, but a quick resume of other points are

1. Have an app for data usage, as well as other usage, which shows actual usage and value and gains trust
2. Never, ever, offer a throttled service: if you need an asterisk and footnotes, don't sell it
3. Make the rest of the customer experience easy. An MNO has unlimited bundles that need limiting. There are however a lot of customers out there that are happy to pay for the data they use, as long as it is not throttled, and MVNOs can often end up with some very lucrative high end users.

A final addition is the one of eSIMs, which was presented in the 2016 MVNO World Conference the day I chaired this year. eSIMs are in many devices now, such as iPads and soon rumoured iPhones, and a host of devices coming out soon. You will also need to be able to SIM OTA, which you can do with advanced MVNEs such as the one I built  but not many do; which means yet another service to integrate, pay for, another relationship to managed, etc. etc.

MVNO World Congress Pre Conference Workshop 2015

2015 Pre Conference Workshop - MVNO Marketing

I had the pleasure of running the MVNO world Congress pre-conference workshop in the 2015 #MVNOIS, so as we run up to the 2016 MVNO event in Amsterdam its probably time to upload some of the slides to give you an overview and share some of the experience.

2015 #MVNOIS Pre Conference Workshop 

The workshop was in three parts, this is the first part that focussed on MVNO Marketing, which in my now 16 year of doing MVNOs, is the hardest hurdle after the MNO agreement and MVNE plus all the other service provision contracts selection. The second part focusses on MVNO Data.

2015 #MVNOIS Pre Conference Workshop topics covered

I Will cover the MVNO Data services, MVNO International Roaming, and MVNO Multi-IMSI points in the next few days / weeks running up to the 2016 Conference, as these areas are key, if not the key way an MVNO can differentiate itself from other MVNOs and moreover its host MNO and grow scalability in a competitive mobile market.

An Activity every MVNO should do almost daily!

The first task was to name 3 Big MVNOs that the audience think market themselves well. This is important on many levels.

• Firstly, if there are none of them in your market you need to ask some serious questions about why and make sure you are not repeating any of their mistakes! 
• Secondly, it is where MVNOs most differentiate themselves at conception, but most easily compromise on in launch... and to be honest, from there they often never launch and/or never become successful. 

To be a successful MVNO you need to be able to easily access all the needed data on your customers, process this and send targeted below the line packages at them. The key here is that they are below the line, competitors do not see them, customers love and recommend them, but your competitors do not copy them. I want you to think about this as you go through the slides, and I add my 3 top MVNOs further down.

This is sadly where a lot of marketing time is wasted by MVNOs - above the line copy cat price competition - why?

Most MVNOs develop what I cal a bi-polar frankenstein approach to Marketing.

• Bi-Polar as they flit between being slightly cheaper that their most expensive competition, to undercutting the cheapest offer from the biggest MNO in an instant. 
• Frankenstein as the first marketing and even product set, is usually stolen from every MVNO that has ever existed in 5 countries, over 3 MVNO models in 6 different niches... and the result is, well usually awful! 

The way MVNOs market is by sending bespoke offers to their customers that will never be on a slide, as they arrive via SMS and the offer is only available to those customers, or other customers of the MVNO. To do this you need ready and quick access to data:

• who do they call? 
• what time do they call?
• what handsets IMEI/MSISDN database are they using?
• what locations are calling from frequenting?
• what locations are they running out of credit?
• where are they topping up?
• how much and how often are they topping up?
• what top-up channels are they using?
• what type of data are they using, where and how fast?

All this is in the CDRs, GGSN and HLR, and needs to be available to the OCS needs to be fully integrated with this, as well as a tool to bulk SMS, and report who has what SMS, as while you will be marketing daily, its not good to market the same customers more than a few times per month for obvious reasons.

"If you cannot name 3 MVNOs from your territory that do this well, its most likely that they do not have access to this data, and if you do not, then you will not be a leader either" 

MVNOs are a Sales and Marketing organisation. The best ones have great BI and change pricing flexibility 

OK I jumped a few slides here on refining product and marketing, however this slide leads on well from above as well as: When an MVNO examines its subscriber acquisition costs (SAC), ARPU and Churn, it very quickly sees that MVNO led customer to customer and MVNO to customer led marketing obtain customers cheapest and keep them the longest. It is important to have a mix of SAC but these need to be kept down to grow successfully as an MVNO.

Choose and adapt from successful MVNOs, but avoid "Bi-Polar / Frankenstein" campaigns! 

Draw on what has worked and what is (see previous slide) is in budget. EE recently did a huge above the line campaign with Kevin Bacon, which is beyond any MVNO marketing budget, however its OM4G and 4GEE twitter coverage was cheap and genius and well within MVNO budgets.

Back to the three MVNOs from the activity above, go through these points.

In my workshop I then went through the above key points for three MVNOs I think market themselves well. My examples were deliberately different: Lyca Mobile, Virgin Mobile and Tesco Mobile; the key being that while they are very different MVNOs in very different segments, theirs USPs focus on points that the MNO and other MVNOS find hard to copy, they deliver what they promise without extensive T&Cs, and typically their most successful packages are no where near as cheap, nor anywhere near as expensive, as the cheapest / most expensive MNO offerings of the "Bi-Polar" approach to pricing.

My most copied slide! The MVNO must evolve its marketing to launch successfully and then grow

Which brings me to the last slide of the Marketing section, and my most copied slide. Every MVNO that has been successful has evolved through these stages, many that have failed have failed to adapt, either because.

• They just did not evolve. Some ethnic MVNOs started with a multi-language USP, but as customers learn their host country language the product needs to evolve, or the countries expand.
• They could not evolve technically as they were tied too much into their host
• They could not evolve operationally - if the reporting is manual spreadsheets... you are not going to market successfully beyond early adopters.

When launching an MVNO you can get by with the basic tools that an MVNE and the host MNO gives you, as long as this includes: CDRs, IMEI, HLR location of LUs, all transactions, collated top-up info, SMS marketing tools and reports, reconciliation, GGSN logs, etc. These need to be accompanied with the ability to update data settings OTA, edit the SPN OTA, change tariffs real-time, etc, etc. and usually require another 10-20 services to be sourced and integrated to move beyond early adopters.  These are the keys missing from failed MVNOs or underperforming MVNOs.

I hope you find these slides useful and informative. Feel free to paste these slides into your own presentations, as many do, but of course please do the basic common courtesy of quoting where the content is from if you do change the appearance and/or remove any logos, watermarks, etc.

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. 

Driving effective data revenue and reducing cost to serve MVNO

Well it has been a while since my last post, but I have been in the thick of working with major FSTE, NASDAQ, AIM and other quoted MVNOs and would be MVNOs and its difficult to blog when you are dealing with sensitive work, especially when a person on a team from another consultancy who shall remain nameless spreads rumours that you may have published the MVNO marketing strategy on your blog but failed to notice the post was from 2 years previous to even working with them :). Well done that man!

So, this post is about two critical points of being a successful MVNO and how this can be easily achieved in today's major trend for growth, and to publish some slides on the point that I presented back at the MVNO Dynamics London event earlier this year, those of you who attended will already have this presentation and heard it live.

Presentation originally done at http://www.mvnodynamics.com/event01/

We have been building MVNOs for longer than anybody out there and seen all the trends, from international voice to SMS and now data is taking another surge. With each new surge comes problems, as wholesale generally follows a second wave on raw material costs (in this case wholesale data rates) and has to deal with "me too" and "mass market" customer issues without usually having thousands of staff and retail stores to absorb (and hide the true cost) to serve this mass market.

Virtuser has been doing MVNOs longer than anybody; we have seen all the trends come and grow! (go) 

Just a brief history of how we got here. We do not just do MVNOs, we have also done a lot of mobile apps and mobile app stores for the likes of Nokia, Vodafone, Telefonica and more. We enable the world's first OTA distribution for specific handsets, the worlds first mass distributed apps and the worlds first Cloud based service sending our now competitors' OTA settings. We started doing our own settings when our clients were disappointed at the poor (30% to 40%) success rate of the standard OTA settings profile. We are still seeing this today where static OMA Alliance settings are sent.

We understand the full 360 of mobile data and MVNOs better than anybody; and this shows in the quality of our OTA

There are two critical points therefore in enabling data revenues - First you need to get the right settings easily on the handset, MVNO APNs do not generally come on a handset, as MVNOs do not buy nor subsidise handsets on mass, so you are stuck with OTA or "over the Air" configurations, but not all settings are created equal. In the old days they were all send by SMS, but handset fragmentation has meant that there are multiple ways depending on the device OS

Static OMA Alliance settings are only 40% to 50% effective, and create a huge cost to serve burden. the average MVNO customer care call for MVNOs in the UK is around £4!

Furthermore this is compounded by different versions of OS having different OTA experiences. Some of our competitors started using mobile apps to configure phones back in 2010 in the aftermath of the "app boom". however our work with mobile apps and mobile apps stores had taught us a few things the main one being that while mobile apps maybe mainstream, a very large proportion of smartphone users still get someone else to load and install apps for them, or do not download them at all.

The user experience of a previous client using standard OMA alliance static settings

Even if you do stick to standard SMS, you should never use a commercial SMS gateway, but if you do go for high quality over costs and do a huge amount of testing, as we can see here the character set was causing the OTA link to fail, after the customer had been forced onto a computer, to enter the phone number, incur and SMS, then for nothing... what will this customer do? call you call centre and cost you probably more than you earn in profit from them in 1 to 2 months!

Having worked extensively on MNO and MVNO data revenue driving initiatives we understand the importance of 3 clicks!

You should never have a data enabling service that means the experience varies significantly from device to device, nor any experience that takes more than 3 clicks if you want it to drive mass adoption. So this is what Virtuser has done with the OTA APN settings, and created the most advanced APN data settings available.

The same client user experience on Virtuser; the real cost is only found in the end result!

Its simple, keep it simple, but most off all keep the experience as uniform as possible across devices, as a) people change handsets or have multiple handsets on different OS and b) they usually ask someone for help, who may well have a different OS.

The results of good user Experience, uniform service, and bespoke settings for thousands of handset/OS combinations built on the fly (the most advanced OTA APN platform) is significantly increased data revenues and an affordable cost to serve.

If you serve dynamic settings, in an automated but controlled fashon, with a uniform and well thought out manner then the benefits are huge and data traffic is presently in the 100s of Mb per user per month in MVNOs across the developed world, so what are you waiting for???

We have been a trusted advisor and service provider of the most successful MVNOs, MVNEs, MVNAs and MNOs for over 13 years, and stepped in to do this presentation at the last moment when the planned speaker let Ramy and MVNO dynamics down at the last moment. Obviously Ramy knew who to call; if you want the best data settings, are thinking of becoming an MVNO or just want the presentation in full (I have cut our some operational slides) then you can see more on the Virtuser OTA APN Settings page or contact me to discuss either via this page (middle right of this page) or via the Virtuser Mobile OTA APN website.

Mobile Roaming Regulation 2014 Customer Experience

When speaking to the organisers I thought it would be a good idea to present at the Mobile Roaming Conference 2013 on the impact of the EC Roaming regulations 2014 from, you know, the customers' perspective. It was a good idea and the presentation was received very well... however writing it was a lot more painful than the usual presentation!

It was only right to add the cover after I had made it look so nice...

So the premise of the presentation was to look at the user experience (UX) of customers while roaming in the European Union and how this may change with the wider EC roaming regulations of 2014, which will of course affect MVNOs. Virtuser is pretty well placed to speak about this, as we were there for the first round of regulations, requiring last minute WAP pages and SMS gateway solutions, and we have helped numerous MVNOs comply with regulation with advice of charge, etc.

Apple was not the first App Store, by far, nor the first to do apps, but the won with great UX

So what is the customer experience at present of not just the roaming regulations, but also just roaming... well its not a good one and its very, how shall we say, pre-iPhone, in fact pre WAP: when did you ever have a great text based customer experience?

The present Roaming Regulation experience is pretty dire and text only mostly

Most roaming experiences start with an overly edited text message, with no number to call customer service for free as we are supposed (come on, we know standard customer care calls abroad are not free, right?), the SMS service is most likely completely disconnected from any core systems or customer care tool and is the main reason why there are so many dormant roamers: when did a text based UX last convince you to buy something?

The roaming experience gets worse, what happens when you go over your limit? 

Then what happens when you go over the €50 limit? the €5 per day all inclusive plans are brilliant, but after 10 days what do I do... well you opt out and one operator was good to their word (above) another shall remain nameless and rubbed their hands together and delivered me a huge dose of bill shock. So I had 10 days of roaming regulation induced sanity, the rest of the time I was back in the dark ages.

And the prize for the best Roaming Regulations advice of charge message is.... 

Vodafone UK has, as far as I am concerned, the best roaming track record post the roaming regulations, however what went on in the office the day they decided this message was the way forward? and this is the reduced version as I culd only fit four screenshots in...

Its not just the regulated messages that are a poor customer experience

After upgrading my iPhone on Vodafone 3 or 4 times, once it decided I needed to change my romaining plan of the last 4 or 5 years... you know, just to shake things up a little: So I arrive and get a message saying I will be charged about 120 times my usual national rate for data as I was no longer using its roaming tariff - great, I am in a taxi, trying not to be taken the scenic route and make a meeting and I have to spend 30 minutes on the phone to my Operator (10 of which were on hold). I finally get it sorted and two hours later get a message, but when did the new tariff set in? was my call that I made a note to check on my bill that was free really free (I never got round to it, but suspect I know the answer).

Then there is the wonderful experience, particular to Voda UK, where on an iPhone, a person in your contacts list calls you and their number appears, you have them saved in your phone, as you do with all your numbers, with the +44 international code... yet you go to call them back, and because voda has delivered the call without the international code you get an error code and a text saying you need to put "00" in front of the number... worse is, I have spoken to a few people in Voda about this and they all go "oh, yes, that..." with a look of "who is going to take the next year of their life to fix that and probably not succeed or be thanked for it anyway" ...and I pay a premium for this type of service?

post 2014 will be different as it will introduce competition and "it will do" will no longer be good enough

So why will 2014 be any different when the second wave of EC roaming Legislation comes in? well, for a start, it will introduce competition. Operators do not typically like this, nobody in business really does, but we accept it as we know it is what get's you out of bed in the morning to drive progress. This progress is also important, as it will mean an app driven, internet based experience with all that that brings: real time knowledge, social interaction and real time reviews and ratings: it will be as close to a proper experience as we can get.and will bring roaming from pre app store to smartphone experience in one swoop... finally!

post 2014 with bring a) competition, but moreover b) an smartfone, interactive web and app based CX

It is this competition, as counterintuitive as it may seem, that will drive the 70% of dormant users to adopt roaming. Just as with national data and widespread mobile usage of all services (voice text and data) it was not just lower rates that drove wide spread adoption: it was competition: people did not message universally until whatsapp and imessage. Yes the operators lost a base a small % of their base who were uber texters, but they gained a complete base of data users who needed text as a fall back and the total volume of texts increased. The same with data, many people needed the comfort of their home wifi and hotspots to make the jump to a data tariff.

So who will win? the counterintuitive answer is everybody, as this will drive out the 70% dormant roamers

TBH many roamers will stay with the even lower price drop of their native operator, but if they go over their €50 limit, or their boss/client suddenly decided they need to rewrite a presentation with videos in it (been there) they have mobile options that do not mean finding a cafe with internet.

But there is still a lot to think about, like data configs when you break out and when you go back, fortunately Virtuser has a Mobile Roaming regulation OTA Data setting solution for this

I spoke to a lot of people about this, in my own mini focus group and took some great phrases you see in the word cloud from industry insiders, regulators and users: like:

• It will take a while for people to gain faith in roaming regulations, like a whole yearly cycle of travelling. 
• Value is important. you do not want to pay €5 or even €2 every day, but you will happily pay €10 just for data the day your boss needed that presentation yesterday
• legacy billing is no longer an excuse, in fact its the excuse we all got bored of and drove this regulation in the first place!
• Technology challenges need to be overcome, like even UX, how do you go from one app (your native host operator) to the LBO app and configs and back again. It's bound to break at first! 
• Competition is key, its no longer enough to ignore this, or your revenues will reflect this
• Roaming is still a huge revenue by EBITDA % but will need a small investment in UX to grow

But these can be overcome, and whether you an an MNO or MVNO I have helped both through this before... so get in touch if you want to discuss apps and OTA settings and SMS gateways!

Thankyou!

Follow @MVNO_ on twitter or facebook/mvnos or Google+ MVNO page

MVNO product development - post pay vs. prepay part 1: launch

MVNO Product Development - Prepaid MVNO vs Postpaid MVNO

When launching an MVNO, simple and low risk is key "keep it green" :)

One thing that has been a bug bear of every MVNO process has been keeping things simple, which invariably means prepay only for launch. Yes, there is a reason why pretty much all the successful MVNOs that are still here launch pre-pay only; when you are new to a market (most MVNOs are new to mobile) it pays to keep your front and back end processes as simple as possible.

Which leads to the next bug bear which is trying to base your launch product on other players follow-up and mass-market products. Just because your competitors have moved to post-pay does not mean you need to launch post-pay and or even compete with their prices.... (this will be another post...)

Keeping things simple in MVNO is easy, right? 

So back to keeping things simple: Everybody buys into it, yes, but not everybody gets it, and even those that do are easily distracted: It's a bit like being a good citizen; some will never get it, and you should keep them as far away from anything important as possible; others need reminding often, and others only the threat of prison makes them adhere to the rule. The analogy is important here, as most people the fear of failure, like the fear of prison,  is the only way to keep them on the straight and narrow!

Evidence of this is when you get comments from people who you thought got it like: "that cannot have taken long, look how simple it is" or "why are we launching with just pre-pay again?" Simple takes time; anybody can take a collage of other products, jam them together and come up with a half decent proposition in a day, the problem is it will cost you a lot to market, a lot to service and will cost even more in lost sales and churn, and most likely it will fall into the 50% of new businesses that fail and cost the highest business cost of all: failure!

Simple takes time, a lot of thought and often counter-intuitive - but achieves success

So back to why keeping it simple is important? I will start with one of the best comments of the last MVNO conference in Rome by Adam Holt of Tuenti at the last MVNO conference, who said that if they did it over again they would not have done post-paid, as it lengthened the product cycle. I will deal with this in another post, let's just stick here to the precursor of this which is launch:

Basically, before  launch you will need to build a product set that fits with your business model, your strategy and your marketing plan and investment. The variables here are huge alone, but simple will in short be easier to manage, cheaper to market and quicker to implememt. I have seen months' delay from just one billing product complication in run up to launch causing a no-go.

Launch and post launch prepaid mvno benefits

The critical time however comes at launch and post-launch. Here you will be dealing with configuring of a new billing system, running reports hourly at first and trying to work out not just problems, there will be supposed problems that are not actualy problems but have you in a tizzy anyway and real problems as well: It's all so much easier when the product is simple. There will be over performing and underperforming tariffs that need revising up and down, there will be customers who fall short of the next bundle up who will need targetting, and guess what- its all very easy, and very profitable, if the product is simple.    I have seen a first consignment of overcomplicated bundles never make it to acual customers: The offer was well concieved and attractive, unfortunately so much so the SIMs sold very well - to fraudulent SIM box use that was not even in the country of origin within days: the losses were not just the fraud on the network, but the marketing that excited real customers who could not get a product...

Do I need to be a post pay mvno at all?

Then there is the recent developments: I have been using the above slide for over 10 years now, but since then we have seen products like the Oyster Card on the London underground, targeting some of the most affluent people on the planet with pre-pay only, and Starbucks as well with their closed user group that is pre-pay only, with average revenues way above average post-pay mobile bills. The important point is that they do not market the product as pre-pay, and do not allude to the fact, nor hold back on their marketing based on assumptions of post-pay being on the horizon.

Why do mvnos go post-paid at all then?

Most MVNOs may eventually benefit from postpay, the key word being eventually. The 80 / 20 rule, is key here - if you want to get all your customers, some my want a contract, and part of being simple is not making the pain of adoption any more difficult than it has to be, however there are other considerations at this point such as can you afford, or do you want to afford, the higher subscriber acquisition cost? Remember MVNOs live and die by acquiring customers cheaper and keeping them longer, post-pay may lend itself to the latter, but is very hard on the former, as well as being the MNOs bread and butter.

So, even if you cannot keep it simple... At least start it simple, and your chances of sucesses, as well as those of avoiding failure will be much higher, mostly because your marketing budget will have gone further and attracted better customers (you see where I am going here) let alone the fact that your boss / shareholders will not have been breathing down your neck while you are pulling 15 hour days on the red boxes on the slide above!