I drive an unusual car. I live in central London, but unusually have a garage. I've never had a speeding ticket or major accident. I'm male, in my 40s, and work as a telecoms consultant. I drive less than 6000 miles a year. I can be considered an "enthusiast".
All of these are risk factors that insurance companies number-crunch each year, before offering me their annual premium. Some companies decline to offer cover. Some companies specialise in assessing various of the risk factors above, and can price keenly. Some have "live" agents & underwriters involved while others just use an online form and a big computer. They have different tweaks and tunes, such as levels of cover and varying excess (deductible) fees if you claim. If you have an accident/claim-free year, they will probably offer you a discount next year and beyond.
And that's the insurance industry's approach to pricing. It uses something similar for home insurance, health insurance and so on. The details of what and how prices are calculated vary by country, based on culture and law (eg in Europe they're not supposed to discriminate prices based on gender despite women generally being lower risks).
Telecoms, on the other hand, prefers the subscription-based model, with published price plans and perhaps a few add-ons, as well as overage and so-called value added ("out-of-bundle") charges like roaming.
Yet at the moment, much of the telecoms world is:
a) Suffering from a decline of the services which lend themselves best to plans (calls, SMS etc)
b) Trying to work out how to price broadband, given rising usage and declining costs of infrastructure, and a messy relationship between the two.
c) Trying to work out how to balance broadband and Internet access value, perhaps with additional services such as IPTV or new "managed services" completely separate from vanilla, Neutral Internet access (as I wrote about yesterday).
Also, as my colleague & erstwhile debating partner Martin Geddes points out, certain network behaviours (and applications) are worse "citizens" than others, creating problems and congestion. "Greedy" applications can almost be thought of as denial-of-service attacks on other users, consuming excess resource and causing "stationarity" problems. Something similar is true for mobile devices with poor transcievers, or even location - if you live in a basement, you probably consume more of your "fair share" of radio resource than someone on the second floor of a building with big windows. Then there's consideration of signalling (eg on/off applications always ppinging the network) as well as traffic volumes, and so on.
So maybe the telecoms industry should take a leaf out of the insurance companies' book.
Instead of getting a monthly subscription, you get quoted an annual "broadband premium". Watch lots of YouTube over LTE? Access Facebook 74 times a day from your smartphone? Drive a knackered old phone with a lousy radio chip? Download 20MB of emails at 9am in Kings Cross Station? Then sorry, but you're a poor broadband risk, and your premium is going to be really high.
The interesting thing is that if there's enough competition at a retail level (eg with MVNOs or new forms of wholesale), there ceases to be a need for full "transparency" on pricing. Each operator collects its own set of variables, crunches it through its own algorithm, and comes up with a personalised quotation. It also analyses your real usage and "risky online behaviour" to refine its premium next year. Maybe we see the emergence of companies similar to credit-scoring that rank your broadband social/anti-social scores.
Yes, there would need to be a whole range of safeguards put in place. It wouldn't be a direct copy of the insurance business. But it would certainly be a more interesting - and perhaps fairer - way to price broadband and Internet access services. (There would probably need to be assorted regulatory changes too, I know, as well as privacy challenges).
My general view is that business models - and revenues - are driven by the OSS/BSS function in telecoms. Network innovation and network-resident policy functions there to enforce certain things, manage/optimise some others, and monitor and measure statistics - but is not at the core of business model innovation. You only need to look at the years of futile and failed attempts to use DPI and PCRFs to create so-called "application-based" plans. By all means instill more intelligence in the control-layer of the IP core to manage costs and aspects of customer experience - but that's not where the revenue side of profitability will stem from.
And from the OSS/BSS side? You've been talking about "personalisation" for years, and more recently "big data". The problem has been that personalisation hasn't really been personal ("what bolt-ons do you want to buy, based on a central core plan?"). The insurance approach would need very big data to be effective, and would by definition deliver completely personalised prices.
Now yes, I know all this is a bit of a straw-man. It would be hellishly difficult to do, especially with legacy networks and legacy charging/billing systems. But I'm really curious about whether people could actually see it working, if we started from a green-field situation.
Sidenote: this is the type of properly "out of the box" thinking you get if you employ Disruptive Analysis as a consultant or business advisor. You might not agree with all the ideas - but the point is to stimulate *real* business-model and technology innovation, not just a warmed-over iteration of the last century's ideas. Contact information AT disruptive-analysis DOT com. Don't Assume.
All of these are risk factors that insurance companies number-crunch each year, before offering me their annual premium. Some companies decline to offer cover. Some companies specialise in assessing various of the risk factors above, and can price keenly. Some have "live" agents & underwriters involved while others just use an online form and a big computer. They have different tweaks and tunes, such as levels of cover and varying excess (deductible) fees if you claim. If you have an accident/claim-free year, they will probably offer you a discount next year and beyond.
And that's the insurance industry's approach to pricing. It uses something similar for home insurance, health insurance and so on. The details of what and how prices are calculated vary by country, based on culture and law (eg in Europe they're not supposed to discriminate prices based on gender despite women generally being lower risks).
Telecoms, on the other hand, prefers the subscription-based model, with published price plans and perhaps a few add-ons, as well as overage and so-called value added ("out-of-bundle") charges like roaming.
Yet at the moment, much of the telecoms world is:
a) Suffering from a decline of the services which lend themselves best to plans (calls, SMS etc)
b) Trying to work out how to price broadband, given rising usage and declining costs of infrastructure, and a messy relationship between the two.
c) Trying to work out how to balance broadband and Internet access value, perhaps with additional services such as IPTV or new "managed services" completely separate from vanilla, Neutral Internet access (as I wrote about yesterday).
Also, as my colleague & erstwhile debating partner Martin Geddes points out, certain network behaviours (and applications) are worse "citizens" than others, creating problems and congestion. "Greedy" applications can almost be thought of as denial-of-service attacks on other users, consuming excess resource and causing "stationarity" problems. Something similar is true for mobile devices with poor transcievers, or even location - if you live in a basement, you probably consume more of your "fair share" of radio resource than someone on the second floor of a building with big windows. Then there's consideration of signalling (eg on/off applications always ppinging the network) as well as traffic volumes, and so on.
So maybe the telecoms industry should take a leaf out of the insurance companies' book.
Instead of getting a monthly subscription, you get quoted an annual "broadband premium". Watch lots of YouTube over LTE? Access Facebook 74 times a day from your smartphone? Drive a knackered old phone with a lousy radio chip? Download 20MB of emails at 9am in Kings Cross Station? Then sorry, but you're a poor broadband risk, and your premium is going to be really high.
The interesting thing is that if there's enough competition at a retail level (eg with MVNOs or new forms of wholesale), there ceases to be a need for full "transparency" on pricing. Each operator collects its own set of variables, crunches it through its own algorithm, and comes up with a personalised quotation. It also analyses your real usage and "risky online behaviour" to refine its premium next year. Maybe we see the emergence of companies similar to credit-scoring that rank your broadband social/anti-social scores.
Yes, there would need to be a whole range of safeguards put in place. It wouldn't be a direct copy of the insurance business. But it would certainly be a more interesting - and perhaps fairer - way to price broadband and Internet access services. (There would probably need to be assorted regulatory changes too, I know, as well as privacy challenges).
My general view is that business models - and revenues - are driven by the OSS/BSS function in telecoms. Network innovation and network-resident policy functions there to enforce certain things, manage/optimise some others, and monitor and measure statistics - but is not at the core of business model innovation. You only need to look at the years of futile and failed attempts to use DPI and PCRFs to create so-called "application-based" plans. By all means instill more intelligence in the control-layer of the IP core to manage costs and aspects of customer experience - but that's not where the revenue side of profitability will stem from.
And from the OSS/BSS side? You've been talking about "personalisation" for years, and more recently "big data". The problem has been that personalisation hasn't really been personal ("what bolt-ons do you want to buy, based on a central core plan?"). The insurance approach would need very big data to be effective, and would by definition deliver completely personalised prices.
Now yes, I know all this is a bit of a straw-man. It would be hellishly difficult to do, especially with legacy networks and legacy charging/billing systems. But I'm really curious about whether people could actually see it working, if we started from a green-field situation.
Sidenote: this is the type of properly "out of the box" thinking you get if you employ Disruptive Analysis as a consultant or business advisor. You might not agree with all the ideas - but the point is to stimulate *real* business-model and technology innovation, not just a warmed-over iteration of the last century's ideas. Contact information AT disruptive-analysis DOT com. Don't Assume.
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