Guest Blog
A little over a month ago I was making the rounds at Mobile World Congress. Speaking to a bunch of vendors and operators, there was an overwhelming consensus that VoLTE would be the number one driver for the PCC market during 2015. VoLTE will force many operators to replace or more likely add another PCRF […]
Last week I received a letter from Capital One regarding my cashback credit card. The letter from the payments company indicated I would no longer receive cashback on my card; something of a disappointment as it was worth a few hundred pounds last year. The explanation of the change read “Changes in our industry mean […]
A new report from the World Bank shows that alternatives to cash are helping to drive down the cost of remittances around the world. The global average cost of sending $200 declined from 8% in Q4 2014 to 7.7% of the amount transferred in Q1 2015. But is this progress enough, asks Charmaine Oak? As […]
Did anyone else notice that Nokia just bought Alcatel-Lucent for less than Facebook paid for WhatsApp in 2014? News broke on April 15 that Nokia has agreed to acquire Alcatel-Lucent for $16.6 billion/€15.6 billion in an all-stock deal. Compare that to news from February 2014 that had Facebook buying WhatsApp for $19 billion – a […]
Despite maturing markets and the digital shift, most operators continue to work with an outdated store mix that was designed in a simpler channel environment. Big branded stores were designed to sell devices, which made sense during the massive shift from feature phones to smartphones. But that wave has leveled out, while branded stores remain […]
Mobile operators are struggling. For decades they have focused on expanding networks to improve capacity and coverage, attract new customers and grow revenues. During this period, billions has been invested to bolster the performance of traditional operator services like voice and SMS, then to support growing demand for data services when mobile internet became popular, […]
Optus (Singtel – Australia) announced today a new shared data plan for families. Funnily enough, an industry colleague sent me an email recently with the title – AT&T Attracted 2 Million Customers in Just 5 Weeks With Shared Data. They wanted to know if shared data is a North American phenomena or are other locations […]
Firstly, let me throw out a controversial statement; “TM Forum’s Business Process Framework (eTOM) provides, the best platform available to bridge the gap between Business Strategy and Technological Execution”! This is not to say that the Business Process Framework (eTOM) alone is enough, but in conjunction with other best practices it can perform magic. I […]
Have you ever left a smiley 🙂 or other emoticon at the end of a text message? Maybe you need to check your handset and your tariff before you do, warns British consumer website MoneySavingExpert.com. After being warned by readers, they wrote a brilliant article which elegantly explains how unanticipated interdependencies between systems can lead to […]
Technologically speaking, the credit card as we know it should have vanished long ago. It’s surely not got much longer . Back in 1979, when I was taking a computer science course at Univeristy that involved writing in FORTRAN (*) on an ICL 2900 series behemoth, the computer scientist Christopher Evans wrote a popular book […]
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