Carriers’ mobile networks are extremely vulnerable to sudden changes in the signaling behavior of popular applications. In fact, Patrick McCabe, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Alcatel-Lucent, devolves into this subject in some detail in a recent blog, Google’s power to impact network signaling. In fact, while Google Cloud Messages provide an example in the blog, the companies recent Mobile Device Report goes into the topic regarding the impact of the top mobile apps on signaling in greater detail.
Google Cloud Messaging for Android, according to the search giant, is a service that allows data to be sent from the App Engine or other backends to users’ Android-powered devices. That could involve the transmission of a lightweight push notification telling an Android application that there is new data to be accessed from the server (like a movie uploaded by a friend) or a message containing up to 4kb of payload data (so apps like IM can consume the message directly).
Such apps and interactions, however, can have a notable and negative impact on both mobile networks and the endpoints connected to them, according to McCabe. And, in the case of Google Cloud Messaging for Android there is ample evidence it already has.
The study by Alcatel-Lucent indicated there was a dramatic increase in signaling traffic from Jan. 12 to Feb. 19 due to the Google Cloud Messaging application. That involved a Jan. 12 signaling increase from 17 percent to 20 percent. Then, on Feb. 4, such signaling went from 21 percent to a peak 23 percent. Signaling relative to this Google application returned to expected levels on Feb. 19, according to Alcatel-Lucent, which added that these variations were not due to any increases in active subscribers.
The reason why Alcatel-Lucent is highlighting this is to increase awareness of the challenges for the signaling network and the mobile network at large, as well as a drain on related user endpoints (in this case Android smartphones) that the explosion in applications is causing.
“Although a rise in signaling share from 17 percent to 23 percent on a single application may appear rather innocuous at first, it does have a significant impact on mobile networks,” writes McCabe, based on information derived from Alcatel-Lucent’s the Motive Wireless Network Guardian for mobile network analysis. “During this period of signaling increase, an average erosion of 6 percent in overall signaling capacity was experienced across the networks that were analyzed. This is a costly loss that can place a large strain on radio resources, and it can even cause outages in locations that were already operating close to capacity — or where there was a dominant proportion of Android users.”
Concentration of the impact of the increasingly app-centric use of the network tends to look almost exclusively at traffic in general. However, in order for all of those apps to work with a high quality of service (QoS) the signaling network needs to be able to understand accommodate the spikes the various types of apps can cause. It is why having network visibility into app impact on signaling is so important.
]]>Alcatel-Lucent recently compiled the result of actual data collected by its Motive® Wireless Network Guardian. The data, from over 30 million subscribers, is aggregated from live 3G customer networks across most regions of the world, and represents total daily data usage of over 1 petabyte.
Figure 1 shows that Android and iPhone devices make up more than 86% of the total connected devices in the global composite network that was analyzed – a testament to how pervasive smartphones have become. This is consistent with the findings from other industry reports. This may be a harbinger of things to come with respect to consumers’ voracious appetite for more and more features, capabilities and personalized experiences.
To accurately measure the overall impact on the network, it is important to consider just how much data is being used and overall signaling activity. Data usage drives the service provider’s bandwidth-related capital expenditures and the consumer’s data usage fees. Signaling activity measures the amount of network-to-device bi-directional exchanges needed to manage a radio connection to a mobile device. Signaling uses spectral, hardware, and processing resources in the service provider’s network and is a significant cause of battery depletion on a mobile device.
Figure 2 shows the percentage share of both data usage and signaling activity for each device category in the network.
Androids consume almost 50% of the total network data usage and, combined with the iPhone category, account for more than 80% of the total network data usage. When looking at signaling activity, Androids and iPhones also dominate with Androids representing an incredible 59.7% percentage share of signaling activity. Combined with the iPhone category, they account for almost 90% of the total signaling activity. It is also clear that Androids have a larger impact on the network than iPhones do as its share of signaling and data usage are 59.7% and 47.9%, respectively, when compared to 28% and 34%, respectively for iPhones. This difference represents a 31.7% higher share of signaling and a 13.9% higher share of data usage for the Android category over the iPhone category. This is due in large part to the fact that worldwide Androids are more popular than iPhones, but also because, individually and on average, Androids signal more than iPhones.
Despite only a 2% subscriber share, the Dongle/Datacard category shows a 9.4% share of data usage. This may be explained by understanding that these devices are typically attached to a PC or laptop which has a larger screen and is not as prone to mobility as are smartphones. As such, these devices may be consuming a proportionally larger amount of data usage than other categories by streaming video, downloading various videos, playing online video games, downloading/uploading high-res pictures, etc.
The Mobile Wi-Fi category shows a similar trend. With only 0.5% of the subscriber share, this category still manages to consume 4.1% share of data usage. This represents the largest data usage-to-subscriber share ratio across all device categories due to each Mobile Wi-Fi device having many mobile Wi-Fi devices aggregated behind it, collectively generating a large amount of data for a relatively small percentage of subscriber share.
The Machine to Machine (M2M) category represents non-personal devices that fall under commercial use for monitoring and control purposes. M2M devices signal much more actively when compared to their data usage. In this global composite network, M2M consumes 0.2% share of data usage while generating 1.4% share of signaling activity. Although tiny in terms of overall popularity, the M2M category represents the largest ratio between signaling and data usage, which means these devices are signaling a lot more than they are sending data. Some M2M applications, such as a home smartmeter, frequently establish mobile connections generating multiple signaling messages to establish network connectivity, yet have small amounts of data to send each time.
The growth rate of mobile data is staggering and continues to increase at an incredible rate as mobile devices have evolved from being tools for personal communication into being high performing, multi-media platforms. Live-streaming high-definition (HD) video, surfing the web, engaging in social media, on-line gaming and secure banking are just a few of the types of applications used daily on an ever-growing number of connected devices worldwide.
Given that the total number of active wireless connected devices is expected to grow from 13 billion in 2013 to more than 40.9 billion in 2020, it’s critical that mobile service providers, as well as mobile device manufacturers, understand the impact on the mobile network. Which devices consume the most signaling resources? Which use the most data? Answers to questions such as these are essential if service providers are to plan and grow their network efficiently, and for device manufacturers to enhance their designs.
This blog touched on the overall network impact that mobile devices have in the network. In upcoming blogs, I’ll take a closer look at the role device behavior plays in the network. Questions such as how much average daily data usage and signaling activity is associated to each device independent of popularity? What is the most signaling efficient device in the market? How does LTE change the network impact and behavior of devices in the network? Are there regional variations to these findings? What are the top signaling applications behind Androids and iPhones?
Join us for a live webinar on June 17 where our experts will discuss the research results in detail.
Author
Patrick McCabe holds a senior marketing management role in Alcatel-Lucent and is currently responsible for promoting products and solutions for Network Intelligence and Analytics. Patrick has held a number of support, sales, and marketing roles during his 20 years in the telecommunications industry. He was educated at St Francis Xavier University and Technical University of Nova Scotia (DalTech), and holds Bachelor and Masters degrees in Engineering.
Cable multiservice operators (MSOs) have embraced the need for broadband data, and with good reason. Broadband data demand is expected to grow by 560 percent over the next five years, according to a recent Bell Labs study, largely driven by demand for pay TV and video and cloud traffic generated from the proliferation of data centers.
Cable MSOs are doing well by their entertainment services bundled with residential broadband offers, but this revenue is under siege by the likes over over-the-top (OTT) video services such as Netflix and Apple. Hence, cable MSOs are constantly in search of new revenue opportunities.
One strong candidate for new revenue is commercial services for small and medium-sized business (SMBs). This area generated 10 percent of MSO revenue in 2014, according to Gilbert Marciano, CMO Strategic Marketing - Customer & Market Insight Senior Manager at Alcatel-Lucent, in a recent TechZine posting appropriately titled, Differentiate your SMB services with big data. In fact, it is noted that in the U.S. Comcast and Time Warner Cable together generated roughly $5.5 billion from the segment in 2013.
Specifically cited is the reality that cable MSOs are in a good place to offer cloud analytics services, since the infrastructure requirements to properly leverage big data is not cheap. Cable MSOs already have this critical infrastructure and thus have the ability to offer SMB analytics as a cloud service.
To offer such analytics services, however, cable MSOs must address the architectural challenge of connecting hundreds of geographically dispersed SMBs. As Marciano notes, this can be done with a distributed datacenter architecture that is connected by a multi-country IP network in the cloud.
“An ideal solution is to deploy software-defined networking (SDN), which brings this elasticity and automation,” Marciano explains. “Network elements are implemented as software (virtual machines) on a distributed cloud infrastructure whilst SDN brings scaling, responsiveness, and automation to the required interconnectivity.”
This removes the boundaries throughout and across the data centers, dynamically provisioning for a high number of separate VLANs, low bandwidth, high latency, and lack of resilience.
“It is suited to situations with highly volatile usage patterns and where resources requirements increase/decrease depending on loads,” says, Marciano. “This solution creates opportunity for cable operators.”
Indeed it does, and with cable MSOs already making significant headway in the business broadband sector, particularly with SMBs, analytics is a natural addition to their solutions portfolios.
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Service providers are seeing an increasing number of applications moving outside of their control. At the same time, they are facing stiff competition within their geographical markets. Developing new revenue streams has become a top priority. As a result, many service providers have invested in business intelligence systems to help them figure out these new offerings and how to win and keep customers.
Interestingly, despite this need and a sense of urgency most service providers are ignoring their greatest asset: Their network. The network provides more visibility into subscriber usage and trends than Google, Yahoo and Facebook combined, according to a recent Alcatel-Lucent Motive posting on the value of big networks analytics (BNA). They believe it is time for this visibility to be unlocked and put to work.
Alcatel-Lucent offers a way to leverage network data for new service creation through its Motive Big Network Analytics offering.
The Alcatel-Lucent Motive BNA for service creation provides a suite of analytics-enabled solutions focused on deriving immediate value from the network data while positioning service providers within a big data infrastructure. The objective is to unlock greater network data intelligence for operations, engineering, planning, customer care, customer experience and marketing organizations.
The Motive BNA solution offers more than 7000 off-the-shelf network analytics reports as part of its analytics package. It consists of the:
In terms of functionality provided, the WNG taps into a network-based data source in a non-intrusive, real-time and vendor agnostic manner and currently supports multiple mobile technologies (2G, 3G, and LTE). The SG leverages analytics to examine communication patterns and detect malware operating on subscriber mobile devices.
All of this combines m.IQ6 network data, circuit-switched (CS) voice and SMS data sources, as well as IT/OSS/BSS data such as subscriber data plans, profile, and billing information, and offers it up in a big data-enabled analytics architecture. The big network analytics solution architecture then uses analytics output as the foundation for wider solutions by exposing this intelligence to external systems.
The result enables service providers to see what fuels traffic growth, and determine whether the largest contributor to growth is new subscribers, existing subscribers using more data. It helps show the relationship between new and popular applications rolled out a service provider, additional roamer traffic, and recent device promotion, helping to clearly understand the consumer and what is working.
Business intelligence solutions play their role, but service providers shouldn’t forget their best asset for obtaining valuable business intelligence is their network. After all it is the source of data that can be brought to bear on customer retention and growth.
]]>So what has changed in twelve months? Here are some highlights, for me, of some great presentations and scintillating conversations that took place over the course of three days in the shadow of Westminster.
For starters, I heard quite a few references to Customer Effort Score (CES); nearly as many as I did of net promoter score (NPS), at the 2014 edition of this event. First published by the Harvard Business Review (HBR) in 2010, “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers” was a ground-breaking article that claimed you can best win customer loyalty by solving a customer's problem. Plain and simple.
This leads perfectly into the second topic that I heard discussed quite often: self-service or self-care. Various CSPs -- including Comcast, AT&T and O2 (Telefonica UK) -- showed examples of applications that can be used to order new services, change billing information and troubleshoot issues remotely. This aligns perfectly to the notion of the Customer Effort Score because the original HBR article introduced a number of key ideas, including one very important one: making it easy.
CSPs highlighted the benefits of self-care to their organizations, ranging from removing pressure from call centres and saving money, to motivating satisfied customers to make additional purchases.
Proactive action and/or communications was also cited by a number of CSPs as growing in importance. Whether it’s notifying customers on the status of infrastructure projects, network upgrades or outages, being more transparent was an approach that seems to be gathering momentum.
One CSP talked about the importance of correlating customer calls with known network problems, then providing updates on how repairs were coming along. They created a web page where people could register an issue -- even if it wasn’t worth calling about – that resulted in a heat map for all customers to see. In the case of a recent infrastructure upgrade, customer could see exactly what was being done, when/where it was being done and how long it would take.
Another CSP talked about the importance of monitoring network quality and fixing issues proactively, before most customers even notice that there is a problem. According to this speaker, 43% of their customer complaints are related to the quality of the service being delivered, with 17% of complaints being caused by the help desk, 10% by payment issues and the remaining 30% from five undisclosed areas combined.
By closely monitoring their networks, collecting analytics and sharing it with various departments (e.g., marketing, network planning, etc.), they can resolve issues that might affect thousands of people and/or reach out to customers proactively, when issues are known but cannot be fixed immediately.
The bottom line: consumers don’t care about how complex it is to deliver communications services in the 21st century. Instead, they want their service provider to proactively solve issues before they cause disruptions, provide them with the information and tools needed to be self-sufficient and, if they do call the Help Desk as a last resort, they expect the person at the other end of the line to be able to solve their issue quickly, efficiently and right the first time. Now, if only it was easy as it sounds.
Luckily, Motive CX solutions are designed to help our CSP customers provide better services to their customers; the modern consumer. We can make sure that you get that information to the right people at the right time. And the end result is great customer service.
]]>No matter where one looks these days, be it in enterprises or service providers, there can be no disputing that enhancing the customer experience has become a top, if not along with security the top, C-level concern.
Indeed, from burnishing the brand to enhancing customer loyalty, having permission to upsell and getting early visibility on new opportunities the customer experience (CX is now the short appellation) has become a cross line-of-business preoccupation and priority. This has meant business units’ increased attention on listening to, analyzing and reacting upon needs arising from the “voice of the customer” (or certainly knowing more about their service usage behavior), and IT department focus on providing the tools necessary to support these requirements.
It has also meant that businesses of all sizes and vertical markets are changing their views on what it takes to have a better understanding of the customers. This means using new metrics for success. It also has highlighted the realization that you need to look at life cycle management of customers, i.e., as the headline says it is no longer about the destination in the form of a sale but is about assuring optimization of what has been popularized as “The Customer Journey.”
Ultimately, what it has also meant is that organizations need not only the tools, skills and strategies to optimize the customer journey but also need to be able do so quickly. The reasons are obvious but worth repeating. Competitors are becoming more nimble and customers armed with better real-time information themselves have become more fickle. Time is of the essence.
Illustrative of an area where there is, or certainly should be, a sense of urgency regarding having all of the capabilities to optimize the customer journey is in the global mobile services business. This is a sector rife with competition and susceptible to high churn rates. The good news is that the information that resides in the network and various lines-of-business (LOBs), when properly mined, analyzed and acted upon can give service providers more satisfied customers and a competitive edge.
The question is, where are the places to go to get the information and tools needed? The answer can be seen in a recent Alcatel-Lucent webinar, “LTE, It’s Not About the Destination, but the Journey,” which is embedded in its entirety below.
Spoiler Alert!
I’d like to encourage you to view the entire webinar by sharing just a few insights provided by presenters David J. Swift Marketing Director Wireless, and Josee Loudiadis, Director Network Intelligence, Alcatel-Lucent.
The first is the chart that is the backdrop of the webinar (yes you are seeing double) which is a still frame tickler as to why Alcatel-Lucent believes the deployment of an LTE overlay network is the preferred way to go as the vehicle for being fast-to-market. Swift provides a granular explanation but the benefits slide sums it up well.
Source: Alcatel-Lucent webinar, LTE, It’s Not About the Destination, but the Journey
The savings are demonstrable and it should come as no surprise that several of the world’s leading mobile service providers have opted for an LTE overlay as their choice for not just deploying but leveraging the Alcatel-Lucent LTE Express to enable fast deployment.
For her section of the presentation Loudiadis highlights the Alcatel-Lucent belief that the network has the information to keep customers happy. She describes what this information is, and how it can be generated and analyzed for use in looking at:
In fact, a compelling case is made, and again with an emphasis on the need for service providers having some sense of competitive urgency, for implementing an analytics-driven customer care solution such as Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive Customer Experience Solutions.
While a bit of an eye chart, you hopefully get the picture.
Source: Alcatel-Lucent webinar, LTE, It’s Not About the Destination, but the Journey
Yes, the realities of the mobile market, especially as global service providers are in a mad dash to deploy LTE quickly and not fall behind competitors is to get it out there fast. However, being fast-to-market is only part of the equation. You need to also be cost-efficient, and more importantly fast in the market/agile as well. To be the later requires real-time actionable insights. That is where the information and insights from the network become critical.
Success going forward really will be about creating and leveraging better and better knowledge about the entire customer journey. Indeed, it is with such knowledge that services providers can go from being not just reactive but proactive in terms of not just pleasing customers but beating competitors to the punch.
]]>As populations increasingly migrate from rural to urban areas, power utilities face new economic challenges and opportunities around creating and maintaining adaptive grid communications network infrastructure.
The dynamics of this global change are fairly well known, although how to address the challenges isn’t so obvious. For example, cities consume three quarters of energy and contribute 80 percent of CO2 emissions globally, according to a recent report in The Guardian. How can that energy be most effciently delivered, with minimal environmental impact?
Consensus is emerging that what’s needed are smarter, safer, greener cities. Governments and municipalities are under pressure to invest in sustainable infrastructure capable of efficiently delivering services to citizens and workers.
There’s a pretty compelling smart grid transformation opportunity for public-private partnerships embedded in this evolution. Together, telecom service providers and information and communication technology (ICT) providers can bring in their assets, expertise and experience to help power utilities meet goals for smart grid applications.
Smarter energy management for power utilities is an imperative, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to achieve.
ICT is an important driver of economic competiveness, livability and environmental sustainability associated with smart grid transformation for smart cities, noted Marc Jadoul and Jacques Vermeulen of Alcatel-Lucent in a recent TechZine article, “Smart practices for building smart cities.”
“The right ICT infrastructure will affect the way each city will be created and evolve,” Jadoul and Vermeulen noted. “It will enable smart cities to include vastly enhanced sustainable areas, such as smart buildings, smart infrastructures (water, energy, heat, and transportation) and smart services (e-substitutes and e-services for travel, health, education, and entertainment), which drastically change the urban experience for city dwellers and travellers.”
Using broadband networks to provide access for high-capacity communications infrastructure, the city net becomes the backbone of a smart city. Creating that backbone requires investment in an open data approach flexible for a variety of applications that benefit both the city and its population.
This infrastructure foundation opens up opportunities to optimize a city's public infrastructure, including a smart grid to reduce CO2 footprint and lower energy bills. For example, wireless sensors can continuously monitor and control lighting.
Other important aspects of an effective smart grid include real-time remote grid monitoring substation automation, smart metering, and green energy devices.
]]>The increasingly competitive broadband market has service providers facing new challenges as they deliver services to today’s Internet-connected home. One challenge is delivering technical support for the rapidly increasing number of Internet-connected devices in the home. Consumers are now connecting gaming consoles, smart phones, tablets and other devices to their residential gateway, and their broadband Internet service. In light of this increasingly complex and dynamic technological landscape, it is no surprise that service providers have turned to analytics to better understand their customers’ needs.
Gaining a 360° view of one’s customers via analytics is quickly becoming one of the only ways to provide a service that is differentiated from competitors. Customer Experience Management tools are being used to comprehensively manage a customer’s cross-channel exposure, interaction, and transactions with a company, with the ultimate goal of optimizing these interactions from the customer’s perspective and, as a result, fostering customer loyalty.
On September 25, I will have the privilege of speaking at the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo in Denver regarding the use of analytics to optimize the customer experience in the connected home. The Cable-Tec Expo is the cable telecommunications engineering show of the year. It provides the opportunity to discover and learn first-hand about the latest in cable telecommunications technology. I will be attending on behalf of the Alcatel-Lucent Motive team, with the objective of delivering information about our cutting edge products in the realm of customer experience analytics.
The array of devices being used in today’s connected home is generating a great deal of valuable information for service providers. This key data and analytics can be used by operators for managing the connected home in relation to:
The ultimate goal of mining and transforming this data is to create meaningful, actionable insights that can be used to quickly identify anomalies and resolve issues. As operators begin to apply analytics to the customer experience they will be able to create and maintain a culture of customer experience (CX) excellence that is aligned with CX business goals and metrics. Not only that, but they will gain the ability to manage the subscriber experience proactively and predictively in order to continuously improve customer care processes and technologies.
Essentially, the Motive CX analytics framework for optimizing the customer experience in the connected home can be broken down into four categories:
The conclusion is that the use of analytics can have a meaningful influence on subscriber retention and revenue if properly deployed. In my presentation, I will delve further into the above four categories to show you how to best harness device, network, and services data in the connected home to extract valuable, actionable insights with speed and precision. With the churn rate at 89% for subscribers who have had a poor customer experience, more focus than ever needs to be paid to using analytics as a means of improving customer satisfaction and retention.
Hope to see you there!
Alan
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This is the third in the three part series looking at how IP, which has been playing an important role in business transformation for some time, now has become critical to the utilities industry as it is leveraging the transformation of communications networks to IP to maximize smart grid deployments. In short, taking full advantage of things like smart metering and big data means to improve usage, real-time information and improved interoperability.
The future of the smart grid has unfolded slowly partially because adoption is more than a technology issue, and because while businesses want reliability, utilities demand it; a cautious IP migration is almost a given. In fact, part of the path to adoption goes through social challenges, not just technology investment.
As a GridTalk posting on managing the IP evolution inside and outside the organization, by Raul Katz, Ph.D., Director of Business Strategy Research, Columbia Institute for Tele-Information noted, assimilating the new technology on a social level is as significant as making the capital expenditures.
“Changing the business processes, training employees, adapting your organization and operations to the benefit you can derive from technology – in economics this is called the accumulation of intangible capital – means that once you purchase the systems it will take you some time to get to that point, especially in large companies,” noted Raul Katz, director of business strategy research at the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information at Columbia Business School. “It’s called the lag effect. We’ve typically seen this take three to five years, because you’re dealing with human beings and social systems.”
Source: To download GridTalk click here.
He also explained that utilities will have the most success with their IP migration if they focus on change management programs and training.
“In many cases, the programs need to be combined with incentives – not necessarily material – to adopt the new modes of operation,” he noted. “These could range from recognition to additional training activities.”
There also is the need to get it right from the beginning. This need to combine programs with incentives was a big focus for Creos Luxembourg S.A. when it embarked on an ambitious, multi-faceted IP/MPLS project for its national electricity and gas network to replace its existing TDM-based communications system. “With latencies of 5ms-6ms between connecting nodes, you have to have a very high level of control to guarantee service and performance,” noted Patrick Colling, Creos communications expert.
When Creos rolled out its MPLS network, it consulted numerous vendors and had them analyze the situation and test four current differential protections talking together over four high voltage stations to ensure teleprotection.
This methodical process took time, but it has paid off for Creos.
“Since the beginning of 2013, teleprotection has worked throughout our network without any incidents, and we can say that for us there is no difference in teleprotection between the classical interconnection and IP/MPLS,” he said.
Cyber security also requires caution.
“IP is the best-known protocol around the world, so there is absolutely the need to dedicate a lot of time to analyzing how best to bring cybersecurity into the transmission system,” Colling noted. “That took us a complete year. We analyzed it and have now finalized our design assisted by Alcatel-Lucent. It includes things like encryption, firewalls and new security features for routers. You need to analyze your services and how to secure them from beginning to end, and we are convinced that through our investments we have done just that.”
But the benefits of migrating to IP have been worth the time for Creos and others. The future of the smart grid, after all, is going to be heavily reliant on the underlying communications infrastructure transformation to all IP.
It is a scene out of a Mission Impossible movie, only the threat is real. Two product managers and a VP sit down to discuss the latest product release, one that’s been under wraps for months. While the group thinks it is safely beyond the ears of its competition, unknowingly one of those present in the meeting has had malware installed on his Android phone. The malware activates the microphone on the smartphone, and the whole meeting is taped and sent to the competition.
This nightmare scenario is unfortunately not beyond the possible these days.
Kindsight, an Alcatel-Lucent suite of solutions, leverages network-based security analytics such as its 9900 Wireless Network Guardian to reveal the latest trends on security threats to fixed and mobile networks, and its Q2 2013 Kindsight Security Labs Malware Quarterly Report reveals that the number of mobile spyware applications discovered this quarter is on the rise, according to an Alcatel-Lucent blog post, Android phones playing “I spy” at home and at work..
A third of the top 15 security threats are now spyware related, up from only 2 spyware instances the last quarter. MobileSpy and FlexiSpy were already in the top 15 list, but SpyBubble moved up to take the #4 spot while SpyMob and PhoneRecon appeared for the first time, ranking #5 and #7 respectively, according to the report.
Mobile spyware has mostly been confined to the consumer market, but the bring-your-own-device trend is spreading the threat to the corporate world.
“It is surprisingly easy to add a command and control interface to allow the attacker to control the device remotely, activating the phone’s camera and microphone without the user’s knowledge,” noted the blog. “This enables the attacker to monitor and record business meetings from a remote location. The attacker can even send text messages, make calls or retrieve and modify information stored on the device – all without the user’s knowledge.”
Kevin McNamee, security architect and director of Alcatel-Lucent’s Kindsight Security Labs, wrote earlier this month that USA Today, CNN Money and others caught up with him at the Black Hat security event in Los Vegas recently after he showed how easy it is to add malware to apps such as Angry Birds. While iPhones are still relatively secure, more open architectures such as Android are scarily susceptible to security threats posing at legitimate software.
“Anti-virus alone is not enough to stop all malware,” noted McNamee. “It needs to be complemented by a network-based approach to security. Thus service providers can play a value add-added role for subscribers by deploying security software on their networks to spot malicious and unusual device activity and immediately notify device owners with instruction on how to remove the threat.”
]]>How would you like to use your favorite mobile applications without having to worry about going over your data limit and paying overage fees? That’s the idea behind application-based data plans. You pay a monthly fee to use one or more specific applications as much as you want. The data consumed by these applications doesn’t count against your data plan. In some cases, your mobile network operator may decide to make selected applications available without impacting your data plan in exchange for a very nominal fee.
Two categories of applications are particularly well suited to application-based pricing. The first are data-hungry applications, like video and multimedia. Today, some consumers use these applications sparingly because they fear going over data limits and incurring overage charges. The second includes core applications that don’t consume much data, such as text-only e-mail or social networking. These applications may be used to introduce subscribers to the world of mobile data.
Recent network analytics show that mobile video applications are rapidly gaining traffic share, particularly on 4G LTE networks. Subscribers who like to watch video on the go, play mobile games or use other data-intensive applications and content must constantly keep track of how much data they use.
Typically, these subscribers either purchase a monthly data allowance more than large enough to cover their usage or try to manage their use and pay an occasional overage. As noted in the first blog in this series, pricing is a major source of data plan dissatisfaction: Subscribers don’t like paying overage fees or feeling like they’ve paid for data they haven’t used. Asking subscribers to manage their data by limiting their use of favored applications will simply add to their frustration.
Application-based plans offer subscribers risk-free access to these data-intensive applications. The flat monthly fee gives subscribers greater price certainty around application and data usage. If subscribers have purchased large data allowances as insurance against going over monthly data allowances, they may even be able to reduce the size of their general data plans. This combination of certainty and freedom can keep subscribers satisfied and improve their perceptions of the mobile operator’s brand.
Application and content providers benefit when subscribers can use their products freely. They don’t have to worry that their applications won’t get used as much when data caps loom and subscribers start prioritizing how and when to use remaining megabytes. Regular use is particularly important for applications that rely on advertising revenue.
The operator benefits by creating an incremental revenue stream – a monthly subscription – for high-value applications. It may also get a bump in overall data usage as subscribers gain the freedom to use their favorite data-hungry applications as much as they want. Subscribers may also use their general data plan more freely if they are less concerned about running over their data caps. What’s more, by combining application-based pricing with introductory discounts, an operator can stimulate application uptake.
Application-based pricing for core mobile data applications helps the operator introduce mobile data to price-sensitive subscribers and encourage uptake by eliminating the risk of bill shock. It’s a situation where everyone wins: The subscriber gets to use mobile data for a nominal fee without worrying about what the bill will be at the end of the month. The included applications gain new users. The operator gains new mobile data subscribers, some of whom can be moved up the value chain once they begin to realize the value of mobile data.
For example, innovative application-based data plans have enabled Turkcell to grow its mobile data customer base and move subscribers up the value chain. In May 2010, the Turkish operator introduced a free plan for Facebook® Zero, a text-only version of Facebook. Once the market was established, Turkcell replaced the free offer with a paid package that included unlimited Facebook data for a set monthly fee. Turkcell now offers Facebook, Twitter and Social Internet packages, each of which includes application data in the monthly price.
Operators need to take care to define and communicate the boundaries of application-based mobile data plans. There can be no surprises if operators hope to maintain customer satisfaction and preserve the worry-free nature of application-based plans. Operators must clearly explain what happens if subscribers initiate actions that take them outside the portions of the application where data use doesn’t count toward their data plan. Operators will also need to remind subscribers of these policies when they do proceed with these actions.
For instance, let’s say an operator offers an application-based plan for Facebook Zero. A subscriber clicks a link in a friend’s status and initiates an outside video stream. Should links like these be deactivated? Should messages warn subscribers that they are leaving the Facebook Zero application and their data plan will be charged if they continue? A general data bucket can help: Subscribers can decide to continue and be covered by their general plan. This is far more satisfying than being surprised with an unexpected data bill at the end of the month.
Operators can’t create successful application-based plans by themselves. They need to partner with application providers so they can be aware of upcoming changes and determine how these changes may affect data usage and subscriber behavior. For example, Instagram’s new video capabilities significantly increase the data used by the Instagram application. In the following figure, the white area highlights the jump in mobile connections to instagram.com in the days following the introduction of video capabilities. If an operator had offered Instragram in an application-based data plan, it would have wanted advanced notice of this update so it could adjust its own offer to subscribers.
Application-based pricing doesn’t have to be all or nothing. An operator can offer an application with data included up to a limit. For example, subscribers to KPN’s Spotify® Premium service get an additional monthly data allocation of 500MB to use with the Spotify application. Once a subscriber reaches this application-specific limit, KPN can charge additional Spotify data use against the subscriber’s general data plan. The idea is to provide enough data with the application to meet the needs of most subscribers.
Operators need an online charging system and subscriber data manager to implement zero rating and subscriber entitlements. Policy control is required to inform the billing system when to zero rate. Deep packet inspection may be required to examine traffic flows and determine what application is being used and what the data is so the appropriate rating can be applied.
With the right strategy and supporting technologies, operators can develop application-based data plans that generate incremental revenue and spur data usage while providing more certainty to subscribers and application providers.
Up next in our Six Degrees of Mobile Data Plan Innovation series: third-party pays. Follow the blog series on TMCnet. Click here to subscribe to the series and get information and updates about the latest in mobile data plan innovation.
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]]>The rise of big data is causing service providers to ask some big questions: How should we store our data? How long should we keep it? What parts of it are relevant to our business? Most importantly, how do we get value from it? To turn big data into a big deal, service providers need to extract insights that can help them make smart business decisions and improve the customer experience.
The value of big data is all in what useful and actionable information it can provide. I find it exciting to see how service providers use big data analytics to gain new insights and solve complex problems. With this post, I’ll look at some new research by industry analysts and three key opportunities that big data analytics presents to service providers.
Improve the customer experience
Across the industry, big data analytics is viewed as a means for providers to see, understand and improve the customer experience. New reports by European Communications and TM Forum show customer experience improvement as a top-three driver for analytics initiatives. They also show that service providers are looking beyond customer support and thinking about how analytics can help them address the entire customer life cycle across all customer touchpoints.
This is happening because service providers want to become the caretakers of the customer experience. In analytics, they see opportunities to develop new capabilities, solve problems and improve quality of experience (QoE). Service providers know the pressure is on: If they can’t deliver on QoE, customers will turn to someone else. Lost customers mean lost revenue, lower customer lifetime value (CLV) and fewer opportunities to monetize service portfolios.
For me, these reports reaffirmed that service providers need QoE-focused analytics solutions. Providers can benefit from data-driven insights that help them anticipate, understand and react to what’s happening in the network and at every customer touchpoint. These insights can help them prioritize issues and offer proactive support that improves the customer experience while reducing customers’ propensity to churn.
Differentiate with QoE
A recent CEM-focused survey by Alcatel-Lucent and Heavy Reading identified big data analytics as a key differentiator for service providers. In fact, “support for big data” topped a list of critical functions for customer experience-driven differentiation.
Why do service providers see big data as a differentiator? Because it’s getting tougher to differentiate with networks, device portfolios and product offerings. For many service providers, the new priorities are to keep the customers they have, extract more value from them and, if possible, lure customers away from competitors. Insights from big data analytics can help providers deliver a superior QoE, one that satisfies customers, sells more services and earns more customer recommendations.
Achieve operational excellence
Service providers believe that big data analytics can help streamline network and service management process and increase operational efficiency. Providers have spent much of the last decade making operations leaner and reducing costs. Analytics offers opportunities to cut costs through reduced cycle times and faster problem resolution.
Increasing complexity and growing customer expectations keep pushing service costs up. To reverse this trend, service providers need a complete picture of what customers are experiencing at any given moment. This calls for analytics platforms that can visualize real-time customer experience levels, derive personalized customer insights and support proactive customer interactions. These platforms must support applications across multiple lines of business, including network operations, engineering, marketing and customer care.
Turn data into action
Service providers are sitting on a gold mine of data about customers, networks, operations and services. With big data analytics, they can start to use this data proactively and turn it into actions that improve the customer experience, increase customer satisfaction and promote operational excellence. In doing so, they can turn data into the big deal it promises to be.
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Greg Owens, Senior Director Customer Experience Marketing
Knowing what to do — and what can be done — with big data are important key to success. But these things are easier said than done. For its special report on big data, European Communications asked respondents to name the biggest barrier to operators seeking to execute a successful big data strategy. A lack of understanding of the potential that big data presents topped the list, getting the nod from 27% of respondents.
This response highlights the real challenge for service providers: finding ways to extract value and create tangible benefits from big data. Providers have vast amounts of information about customers, networks, services and operations. So how can they monetize it?
Most providers lack the expertise they need to extract value from data and apply it within their operational context. Successful monetization requires providers to rethink the way they operate their marketing engines and redefine the roles that business intelligence and analytics play throughout their organizations. Again, it’s easier said than done.
The European Communications study highlights a clear knowledge gap among service providers. A lack of effective analytics equipment and solutions was named the top barrier by 9% of respondents. A lack of qualified staff was identified by 3% of respondents. It’s not hard to see why service providers turn to third parties for help with analytics.
Turning challenge into opportunity
The vendor community has some work to do around big data analytics. The European Communications report indicates that service providers aren’t highly aware of, or satisfied with, current big data offerings. Vendors need to educate service providers about what they offer and improve the quality of their offerings.
A recent sponsored feature from European Communications pointed out that a service provider’s big data initiatives need to be linked to its overall strategy and deeply ingrained in day-to-day operational processes. Providers need to focus on the business questions that big data can answer — for example, how to improve first call resolution (FCR) to reduce costs and improve the customer experience — and the way these questions can inform future strategies. Success comes down to knowing what questions to ask and letting data fill in the answers.
Keys to success with big data
Remember real-time. Providers can’t just batch-process events after they occur. They need quick and easy access to real-time information so they can address problems and opportunities as they come up. By combining real-time insights and analytics with a best-practice approach to collecting, analyzing and distributing data, providers gain the means to use big data to understand and act on complex customer behavior.
Make data digestible. Data has to be presented in an intuitive and easy-to-understand format that suits the needs of each different end user. Marketing, customer care and network ops departments all need a different level or “language” of insight to make informed, timely and effective decisions. Providers need solutions that can tailor information for each audience.
Focus on customer lifetime value (CLV). Respondents to a recent TM Forum survey highlighted the challenge involved in determining and acting on CLV. Some providers felt that they could get a better sense of CLV by looking beyond customer transactions and considering a broader set of interactions, including social networking. Analytics can help providers identify and retain profitable customers. It can also help them understand what causes a lack of profitability of some customers, and how to increase CLV by developing new products, tweaking existing products or developing targeted marketing campaigns.
With big data, the barriers are significant, and cost is a huge consideration. But the return on investment will come from many sources, including an improved customer experience, greater efficiency in offer design, more accurate billing and an enhanced ability to exploit data for marketing campaigns.
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