Why I don’t use Skype much largely is the result of a savvy move from a telecom provider in Southeast Asia.
I have many friends in Asia, many of whom are not exactly rolling in money. So they can’t afford a data plan on their cell phone to use Skype. But what they all can do is use Facebook, and they all can use Facebook because many telecoms in the region give Facebook access away for free while charging for other Internet access such as web browsing. This is a good way to slowly upsell consumers—and to indirectly get me to use Facebook even more than I normally would.
Similar value-added services through selective access to particular mobile applications can be seen here in the U.S., too. T-Mobile, for instance, has recently begun offering unlimited streaming Internet radio even for customers who can’t step up for the larger data plans that normally would be needed to support Internet radio on a mobile device.
This is good business. It is a way that operators can help fend off the over-the-top challenge that threatens to turn telecoms into commodity businesses.
“To be innovative, service providers are finding ways to tailor their services and associated pricing to specific over-the-top application-driven consumption patterns with value-added service models,” noted Steve Morin, director of product management for IP applications in Alcatel-Lucent’s IP routing and transport business line in a recent TechZine article, Monetize your over-the-top mobile applications. “Application based charging and control enables you to accurately monetize a new breed of personalized service plans that have both knowledge and context of the specific underlying applications.”
To be able to do this effectively, an operator must be able to parse traffic finely and have application-level identification and control functions embedded directly into the mobile gateway. But if it has this functionality in place, there are many potential avenues for monetization and differentiation.
Operators can create service packages based on social media, gaming, video or other logical groupings, for instance, and charge a monthly subscription fee for unlimited traffic around these interests. Or a provider could offer a monetary incentive based on what time of day the data was being used, noted Morin.
There are almost an infinite number of potential uses for this model, in fact. Operators just need to figure out how to use properly monetize this value-add opportunity now that mobile applications have quietly gotten customers away from thinking of Internet access as being one and the same no matter what application is using the data.
