Bahri Okuroglu

Friday, November 12, 2010

Building Products that Customers Love - The People

Product Manager: There needs to be one single person who owns the product process for each major product in the company.
User Interface Designer: Each product team should have least one person who is an expert in usability and design.
Product Marketing: Product marketing is not the same as product management. Product marketing is responsible for effectively communicating to internal sales-people, prospects, and customers regarding the product.
Product Development: Product development is responsible for understanding what is feasible, both technically and operationally based on available resources, working extremely closely with product management to understand requirements, and, ultimately the on-time, on-budget, on-quality delivery of the product.

Cory A. Eaves, Managing Director, General Atlantic talking about the important roles in a company. Nice summary to read.

Monday, November 01, 2010

Mobile Roaming World Summit 2010

In its 18th year, Informa Telecoms & Media held the Mobile Roaming World Summit in London. It is attended by over 70 companies which more than half is operators.

Turkcell Technology’s participation

Turkcell Technology participated in this year’s event both as a sponsor and a speaker after couple of years of particiation as delegate. Instead of simply promoting one of our many products on a wide range of areas in telecommunications, we highlighted issues on traffic steering that are actually quite important to maximize the roaming revenues but still not all the operators are paying attention to.

It was specifically nice hearing quite positive feedbacks, both from operators and other vendors, about Turkcell Technology’s presence around the world and our products.

Topics discussed

Several different issues are presented and discussed during the summit, ranging from specific aspects of roaming business to trends in the GSM world in general. The increasing trend in data traffic and its implications to roaming business is highlighted by different speakers, including Informa analyst with numbers taken from their latest report on the issue. Some of the topics catching attention are summarized below.

EU Regulations

Like previous years, the EU regulations and its implications were one of the topics which many were interested in. As the decline in the prices was expected to be responded by big increase in the usage by the customers, there were different presentations showing that it is not happening like that. Yes, there was some increase in the traffic, but not that directly proportional with the decrease in the prices.

Roman Schneider from Swisscom supported this finding with numbers from their network, after they decreased the roaming prices seriously in the recent years as the market leader in Switzerland. Their main finding was that the competitors did not follow them to decrease the roaming prices and the traffic did not increase that much, maybe because only 20% of the subscribers were aware of this big price reduction even with huge marketing campaigns. Roman also noted that the EU regulations are effecting them in a bad way as being a non-EU operator, as the EU operators are charging them more.

Nick White, Executive Vice President of INTUG, International Telecommunications User Group; provided subscribers’ point of view. He mostly defended the idea that the roaming charges are not based on the cost and the regulations should be extended and there should not be a different roaming tariffs. As most of the participants were mobile network operators and the sector, it can easily be said that his view was not shared by most.

A delegate mentioned that in the real world price for most of the products and services are not based on the cost but value. GSM roaming is offering a very valuable and important service - good accessibility all around the world and it is normal that there is a different tariff for roaming. He used iPhone as example to support his view telling people are OK with paying relatively big amount of money compared to the cost of the handset as it offers good value to the customers.

Bill-shocks

Bill-shocks during roaming was another issue highlighted by many, telling that subscribers do find it extremely expensive and the reaction of most of them was trying to find out how to disable roaming features on their handset as soon as they land. An example given by Stephen Ornadel, Head of Carrier Services from Everything Everywhere (ex T-Mobile) was about 13000 pounds of bill after the kids were using data during roaming to watch a single episode of Friends.

Stephen noted that customers have three simple expectations, Control (no surprises), Information (how much do I have left and how to turn it off) and Fair Price (customers understand that roaming may cost more). Stephen talked about T-Mobile’s Euro Internet Booster telling how it addresses all these requirements. It is actually like a set of prepaid data packages selected by the subscriber, which is the only way to use data while roaming. When the package is over you have no data access though it easily can be purchased again. The prices were not that low but still might be better than prices for Wifi at the hotels.

Unfortunately, these packages are only for EU zone and for the rest of the world neither the control nor the attractive prices are available to the subscriber. Still many agreed that these packages are a good way to prevent bill-shocks. T-Mobile noted that these packages could be made available with some big investment in their network, originally intended for national market only.

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Mobile roaming revenue trends and EU regulation

Recently Informa TM issued a press release on Sept 23rd, giving some numbers for mobile roaming business for year 2015. The numbers should have been taken from their "Global Mobile Roaming: Operator Strategies and Market Trends" report released in September.

Basically, they expect roaming business to grow 86% between 2010 and 2015. Even with the expectation of a slowdown because of economic downturn in the beginning, data roaming will help the roaming business to grow in the end. They expect 246% increase for the data roaming revenues with the help of smartphones.

It is also mentioned that 65% of the roaming revenues is generated by enterprise segment, and the the largest roaming market is Western Europe with 41% share.

The same day (Sept 23rd) Neelie Kroes, European commissioner for digital agenda, was speaking at the annual conference of European Telecommunications Network Operators Association (ETNO):

I want the gap between roaming and domestic prices to approach zero, the sooner the better. Significant differences between roaming charges and national tariffs cannot be justified in a true single market. The present financial and economic situation in the EU does not give us much room and time to postpone the creation of a well-functioning telecom and digital internal market. A true single market is one where the price differences between voice, SMS and data relate only to the actual cost of providing these different services.

I do not know if it can happen before 2015, no roaming charges in EU; but seeing these two news reports made me curious if Informa TM was foreseeing such a move this close and if the numbers they provide would be still valid with such a move in the biggest roaming market.

Quoting from Financial Times, we see that operators do not like the idea as any can expect:

Senior European telecoms executives reacted coolly to the European Union’s proposals on regulating the next generation of broadband internet networks, warning that excessive regulation could make large-scale investments less likely.

You can read more here for the comments of executives of France Telecom, Telecom Italia and Portugal Telecom.

Here, you can see that this tren in EU may affect others too.

See also for more:

Update: