A small or medium-sized business using too much bandwidth may have different needs to a residential subscriber. For example, a hotel may be interested in a new fiber service to improve quality of service rather than a speed increase. Understanding the hotel’s usage data allows for smarter marketing and sales strategies and the ability to successfully plan future revenue-generating opportunities.
The hardest part for most service providers is finding, tracking, and making sense of the increasing amounts of data available. Today, it is more vital than ever to filter and analyze raw data to make sense of current network status, forecasts, and subscriber behaviours to uncover under-utilized resources, plan for the future, and strategize for new revenue opportunities.
Without the ability to find and analyze the information hidden on your network, you risk increased bandwidth congestion, lower service quality, greater subscriber churn, and worst of all, a loss of profitability.
Increasing average revenue per user (ARPU) in a competitive market is always a challenge; however, with the increased volume of data and improved granularity, CSPs can generate new revenues from hyper-customized offerings for today’s increasingly unique customer profiles. At the end of the day, data analysis provides service providers the ability to deliver increasingly customized services, improving customer experiences and increasing the profitability of the deployed infrastructure.
Being able to manage all aspects of the customer gateway at the operator level opens a number of interesting options to launch new services. Several operators are leveraging this capability as a revenue-generating opportunity, such as charging customers to activate the WiFi radio embedded in the gateway. The operator provides the customer a managed WiFi experience, eliminating the need for a personal WiFi gateway. This creates a stronger engagement with the customer and opens the door to additional services such as managed WiFi extenders and WiFi optimization as a service.
Other operators deploy community WiFi on dedicated radios in the customer gateway by using dedicated service flows to ensure isolated traffic and bandwidth. Such configurations would be transparent to the customer. When combined with event-based business rules, the operator can ensure that the device settings will always be set correctly. Still, other operators have been leveraging the built-in firewall and basic time-blocking rules on some gateways to deliver managed revenue generating value-added services to their customers.
One major advantage of these new services is that most of them can be launched using subscriber self-service portals. Configuring intuitive web browser-based portals not only helps you launch and market new services directly to your customers, it also improves the subscriber experience by heightening engagement levels and giving your customer more control over how they use wired and wireless services.