The big picture

The paradox in service provider business is clearly showing up. For instance,

never in the history of BSNL has there been a situation where it has announced

Rs 10,000 crore investments on one hand, and over 37 lakh subscribers have

dropped out in a year (in 2004), on the other. On a much smaller scale, that is

the story with most service providers. The erstwhile helpless subscriber is now

asking for the best, or else he will leave.

The operators realize this and the biggest challenge before them is to

acquire new subscribers and retain the existing ones. Price-based selling does

not seem to be going very far now, as it has more or less peaked.Therefore,the

Indian operators will now have to look for newer carrots to dangle.

There are many reasons why subscribers leave. Delayed activation time still

continues to be a big pain point. Subscribers struggle to stay informed about

the new tariff plans and how they can opt for those. Tariff plans keep changing

fre-quently. Many subscribers are not able to utilize them. There is hardly any

customization of services. Customer support, espe-cially in case of problems, is

poor. Obviously, I have not even touched the ever-sensitive subject of quality

of network, which does not seem to improve despite competition.

Essentially, all this means that the service providers will need to become

very adaptive-not reactively but proactively. This is possible only if there

is standardization and flexibility in systems. Only then new service rollouts

will be faster, and ideas will be converted into revenue streams.

The role of IT in any telecom network will determine how adaptive that

network is. We can clearly see that happen if we look at plans of some of the

traditional IT vendors such as IBM, HP, and Microsoft who promise to turnaround

the way telecom networks are managed. Smaller software players are also coming

up with very innovative solutions for service providers to generate new revenues

streams. A recent conference in Malaysia recently had over 200 software

developers showcasing some very imaginative products for the service providers.

Interestingly, they were not too excited about the Indian market.

IT adoption has been slow. Purchase-decision cycle for OSS/BSS, which is the

lifeline of any service provider, is still very slow. Knowledge base of senior

service provider officials on the role of IT in telecom networks is still not

great. And finally, the total spend on IT is still very low.

Clearly, the subscriber is getting very demanding and he has various options.

New services that are flexible and innovative will have to come up. Rollout have

to be very fast And in all this, IT will play a crucial role. As one expert

said, late 1990s was the period of hype and early 2000 that was a period of

disappointment; now it is will be the wave of consolidation and growth. Service

providers who do not see this trend and align and position themselves

accordingly, will be very lucky to survive.