The Indian telecom market is one of the fastest growing telecom markets in the world. Due to its high growth rate, it is also one of the most competitive markets in India, providing innovative and cost-competitive offerings to the end-user. The launch of 2G and 3G has revolutionised the telecom scenario and the way people communicate, share information and stay connected on a 24x7 basis.

While 3G is gradually penetrating the Indian market, long term evolution (LTE) is also finding its way in and is likely to make a significant impact on the market. A recent report has forecast that LTE connections across the world will surpass 1 billion by 2017. The Asian market, driven mainly by India and China, will account for over 47 per cent of these connections.

According to the GSMA, India represents a third of all connections in the Asia-Pacific region, with 970 million mobile connections across the country. This figure is expected to rise to 1.16 billion by 2017. With better spectrum pricing and management and the roll-out of 3G and 4G, mobile broadband uptake is expected to increase by 31 per cent between 2013 and 2017.

As next-generation telecom solutions increasingly rely on harnessing the power of data, a large number of operators are looking to upgrade their networks to incorporate true next-generation capabilities. This is where 4G LTE is fast gaining popularity as a favoured technology.

3G vs 4G LTE

The difference between these technologies is in terms of speed. When subscribers upgrade from 3G to 4G, their browsing speeds and user experience will improve significantly as the speed of data transmission on a 3G network ranges from 384 kbps to 2 Mbps whereas on a 4G network, it will be between 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps. With increased data transmission speeds, next-generation networks will enable HD voice and video calling; speedy file transmissions; seamless internet surfing; online TV, audio- and videoconferencing; and much more. This will take the user experience to a whole new level.

Opportunities

There are many attractive drivers and motivational factors encouraging operators to adopt LTE services and increase revenues by monetising their network infrastructure in a better manner. With the upcoming spectrum auction, operators have some monetisation options, as mentioned below.

• Sponsored data: Under sponsored data, various corporates can pay operators a fee for the right to stream data to a subscriber’s phone without having an impact on their total amount of wireless usage. For instance, Idea Cellular joined hands with Opera Software and Quikr to offer sponsored mobile data. Under the arrangement, Idea customers will get free data usage of 10 MB for an entire day, which will be sponsored by Quikr on the Opera Mini browser.
• Shared wallet: Today, mobile data users are not confined to one device or one plan; they want multiple devices to be connected with the same data plan within their circle of family members or co-workers. Operators can launch such innovative services to reduce churn rates and improve the subscriber experience by getting all family members on the same shared data plan. Bharti Airtel’s shared data plan is one such example. The operator launched an innovative data sharing plan for its customers, letting them share their Airtel 3G data with two other Airtel friends, family members or even devices.
• OTT monetisation: Over-the-top (OTT) players like Skype, Facebook, Viber, WhatsApp, WeChat, Google Hangouts and many others have evolved to address the growing communication needs of consumers and enterprise users. An example of an OTT partnership can be seen in the case of Reliance Communications (RCOM), which launched an Unlimited Facebook plan at a minimal price point. With this partnership, Facebook can expand its users in India and RCOM can leverage Facebook’s popularity to expand its own subscriber base.
• LTE to Wi-Fi interworking: With future-ready LTE to Wi-Fi interworking solutions, operators will be able to seamlessly offload their LTE/3G subscribers to Wi-Fi access points and still leverage the existing LTE packet-core infrastructure, thereby optimising their network infrastructure and spectrum usage. For instance, Aircel has recently launched 50,000 Wi-Fi hotspots across India and also brokered partnerships with Wi-Fi specialist O-Zone Networks Private Limited and wireless internet service provider Tikona Digital Networks Private Limited to offer public Wi-Fi services to subscribers.
• VoLTE: Voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) offers faster call set-ups, carrier grade reliability, and clear HD voice quality. With the launch of LTE services, operators will be able to re-launch their voice offerings.

Need for convergent pre-integrated platforms

LTE-enabled services are driving new revenues for operators but also pushing them to meet the increasing data demands of existing customers and the new ones signing up for high speed mobile broadband offerings. Communications service providers are being impelled to deploy LTE as quickly as they can, refresh their traditional operational support systems and business support systems, and simultaneously launch innovative products that can justify their heavy investments in LTE.

There is a need for putting in place the right kind of revenue generating infrastructure that is dynamic and innovative, and also provides real-time flexibility and high scalability. Operators need an end-to-end ecosystem comprising an online charging system (OCS), a policy and charging rules function (PCRF), convergent billing, partner management, provisioning, business analytics and self-care mobile applications to enable mobile network operators and mobile virtual network operators to achieve faster time-to-market and revenue realisation for their LTE services. All these components of the integrated platform have their own importance:

• Integrated policy and charging: The integrated OCS and PCRF offer a centralised subscriber profile repository and a single product catalogue. This leads to greater flexibility in launching new IP- and IP multimedia subsystem (IMS)-based prepaid plans, tiered family plans, shared data services, customer loyalty programmes and pricing models for LTE and IMS fixed line networks.
• Convergent billing: Convergent billing, in today’s hyper-competitive market, consists of flexible product management; a real-time provisioning framework; flexible mediation, rating and charging; error-free billing and invoicing; complex partner relationship management; and revenue settlement. The new platform supports open standards and innovative technologies for the billing and rating of a rich basket of services like Wi-Max, Mobile, VoIP, Wi-Fi, cable TV/DTH/ IPTV, wireless and LTE.
• Partner management: Partner management involves handling the entire range of life-cycle requirements of partners, from recruitment to settlement. This helps form quick partnership agreements and reduces the time-to-market while offering tremendous value enhancement with the rapid introduction of next-generation content and superior reach through partner networks and brand strengths.
• Highly scalable platform: Easily scalable solutions can help meet the growing demand for new services like triple play, VoIP and VoLTE, and facilitate the provisioning and management of a larger subscriber base.
• Flexible LTE-based offerings: A centralised product catalogue can be created for various LTE plans like VoIP, OTT, prepaid and post-paid product bundles with support for n-level product hierarchy, enabling greater service personalisation and a differentiated experience.
• Business analytics: With proper business analytics on subscriber data usage, subscriber segmentation and consumer behaviour, operators can upsell and cross-sell offers with smarter customised campaigns and product offerings. Selling systematic analyses of customer insights to third parties can also be a major revenue stream for telecom companies.
• Mobile self-care: With its high speed of data transmission, 4G users will be able to download more content than they can via 3G, in the same amount of time. Operators need to provide an enhanced subscriber experience with the ability to self-manage mobile data usage by setting up usage thresholds and notifications, and avoiding excess charges through mobile self-care. This will help operators reduce bad debt and enable users to set real-time configurable actions such as redirection to operator portals for mid-of-cycle top-ups, etc.
• Availability on cloud: Cloud-based offerings are ideal for delivering flexible commercial model for the operator. At a time when operators vie for delivering personalised experiences, flexible “build-as-you-grow” and “pay-as-you-use” commercial models can enable minimal upfront investments and low opex.

The key benefits of the integrated platform include a reduced time for deployment. A pre-integrated stack of policy, charging and billing reduces the time for installation, commissioning and system integration testing. The other benefit is ease of operations, as a single graphical user interface is offered for user acceptance testing, training and go-live queries. In addition, an integrated platform reduces the total cost of ownership by optimising storage and eliminating the need for separate storage for each component. It also facilitates one point of contact for the support and maintenance of all components due to single-vendor ownership. Faster revenue from faster time-to-market is also made easy for new plans with integrated product life-cycle management, OCS and PCRF.

The way forward

So far, only Bharti Airtel and Aircel have launched 4G in India, while Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited plans to launch it commercially in 2015. As more and more operators move towards a data-driven mobile world, there will be more deployments, and other LTE-Advanced features will ensure better network efficiencies for telecom operators.

The benefits of LTE are enormous but it comes at a significant cost with its own set of challenges. The flip side of LTE is the unavailability of 4G-enabled smartphones at affordable costs and the limited network coverage as only two operators plan to launch LTE services. To increase its market share in rural areas, operating systems, mobile applications and content have to be localised as per the tastes of Indian consumers. In addition, newly launched technologies tend to be costlier, which will keep the mass market away from such services.

Despite the above factors, LTE is the way ahead for the creation of new boundaries in the evolving telecom world. The challenges will gradually be resolved as the technology matures in the near future. LTE is the perfect solution for meeting the demands of data-hungry consumers for voice and data-intensive applications on their next-generation smart devices. It will also increase the profitability of operators and create better value for customers.

Guest article by Dhaval Vora, Vice-President, Product Management, Elitecore Technologies