VanillaPlus Magazine Issue 3 2022: CSPs are on the clock to redefine customer experience for the 5G future

VP Magazine Q3 2022

A network is only as good as its solutions. All the power, speed and coverage in the world don’t mean anything if you cannot apply them to create practical benefits for millions of people. In this issue, Eng. Sultan Bin Abdulaziz AlDeghaither, the chief executive of Zain KSA, and Benedetto Spaziani, the general manager at Netcracker, tell VanillaPlus how they’re redefining customer experience for the 5G future.

Inside this issue:

  • TALKING HEADS: Zain KSA’s Eng. Sultan Bin Abdulaziz AlDeghaither and Netcracker’s Benedetto Spaziani share how they are working to redefine customer experience for the 5G future
  • HYBRID WORKING: Giorgio Migliarina explains the value of unified communications for enabling hybrid working
  • 5G DEPLOYMENTS: Hamish White says slow and steady won’t win the 5G deployment race
  • CYBERSECURITY: Allot explains how to unravel consumer cyber confusion and how CSPs can monetise security as-a-service
  • BUSINESS ASSURANCE: Ashwin Menon details how business assurance can deliver the enterprise-wide transformation needed for CSPs to remain competitive
  • PERSONALISED MARKETING: Prashant Maloo explains how to adopt an uplift model to predict churn and deliver high marketing outreach ROI
  • CONNECTED LIVING: Biju Nair takes a bird’s eye view of the global smartphone market
  • CSP TRANSFORMATION: Andrew Walker explores how CSPs are rising to the challenge of change and increased expectations
  • EDGE COMPUTING: Andreas Gabriel details why edge requires a new approach to your IT


Editor’s Comment:

There is no shelter from the stormclouds for CSPs

The clouds are gathering and storms are building but the omens don’t look great for communications service providers (CSPs). Far from having the silver lining they’re looking for, cloud looks to be becoming just the latest miss in CSPs’ bids to find additional revenue streams to make sense of their vast infrastructure investments.

Is it already too late to change the narrative?

If the topology of MWC22 Barcelona was anything to go by, the clock has already run down although others are clinging to the notion that they’re a minute away from midnight. The big cloud providers were at the show but they were not taking up prime real estate on the exhibition floor. As usual, it was the telecoms industry paying the bulk of the cost for providing the space in which the cloud companies operate while the cloud providers confined themselves to more modest spending on meeting rooms and branding opportunities.

This suggests that while they see telecoms as necessary and want to be part of the industry’s conversations so they can influence strategy, they don’t see themselves as CSPs’ equals and partners in creating the hyper-connected, cloud-enabled world. CSPs again will be stuck with picking up the bill for the essential infrastructure while others make the big margins on the services it enables.

It’s a re-run of every mobile innovation of the last 30 years. The CSPs build the network and invest the billions and someone else takes the service revenue, leaving barely enough of a return to justify continued network investment and operation.

Forlornly, CSPs had held out the hope that they’d be partners on a firm footing alongside cloud giants in enabling services in the cloud and sharing in revenues from these. Some CSPs still appear to think they can still play themselves into the cloud services game and a few might succeed but most won’t move quickly enough or be able to innovate and market new services at the pace and depth that web giants have proven they will.

There’s a diplomatic line that cloud giants are walking because they need CSPs to make network investments so they don’t have to themselves, but the stark reality is CSPs will receive only scraps from the large cloud companies’ tables. This leaves CSPs having to increase efficiency to remain viable but it’s not possible to save your way to greatness. New revenues must come to CSPs for them to change the declining profits story that has dogged them for the last three decades.

Instead of seeking shelter, CSPs must storm at full force into the cloud services arena if they really want to take revenue share.

Enjoy the magazine!

George Malim

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