Had a great session with some of our leadership team this morning, questioning how Mobile Operators are going to be able to plan their revenues without pinpointing the capacity of their networks to support new IP services.

Back in the Nineties Mobile Operators were busy throwing together networks with the sole purpose of capturing as many customers as possible. As a consequence their processes for planning capacity were fairly crude and in some cases non-existent – In fact running out of capacity was a great problem to have because it meant you were making lots of money and all you had to do to get over it was beat-up your suppliers to get you more equipment faster! 

Times have changed dramatically however and these same companies are now facing a spiraling decay in the price they can charge for traditional voice services, which were once the very foundation of their existence. Looking at the history of the Internet, as it evolved to provide faster and faster access it was used by more and more people to do more and more things and we can expect the same pattern with mobile networks as they evolve to support high speed data access.

The challenge for Operators now, is that in order to stay in business they have to replace the revenue that they once made from voice with new revenue from data services. When investing in new equipment to deliver these services, Operators don’t really know how much capacity it will have because they have little or no experience of working with the products or the new services running over them.   At the same time, they have less money to spend on equipment that is going out of date at a faster and faster rate – And to compound the problem, competition keeps getting fiercer and fiercer.

To be successful moving forward, these companies need the ability to sell new services at the right tariffs – To the right people, in the right places at the right time.  To do this it is critical that they understand exactly how much capacity they have; where and when; and sell into this. This is exactly what the Cerion team does for a living – So effective immediately we will be bolstering our marketing effort to ensure  this message is clearly communicated to our customers marketing and financial people, as well as to the network groups that we are already working with.

 Peter