Consumer service innovation and Editor's award
Consumer charging innovation
Winners: Tata Teleservices and Telcordia Technologies
Innovative real-time charging services
Tata Teleservices — which uses the Tata DoCoMo brand in India — selected Telcordia to help implement its GSM-based prepaid service offerings in the rapidly growing market in 2009. Within a few months, Telcordia real-time charging was implemented, enabling TTSL to launch its innovative pre-paid service offerings, delivering a highly scalable, reliable, flexible and cost-effective, real-time charging solution.
Since June 2009, it has gone from zero to 30 million subscribers, adding over 100,000, on average, a day.
Tata and Telcordia have since expanded on this proposition by offering a rollover service for unused minutes and SMS for up to three months for enterprise customers. This is a new proposition for the telecommunications market, and means that enterprises ensure they maximise their plan benefits.
Consumer network innovation
Winners: Telefónica and Movius
Secondary mobile line service
Telefónica and Movius are providing a cost-effective personal and private secondary line service for mobile subscribers in Latin America. This service uses a consumer’s existing mobile phone — there is no need to purchase special phones or multiple SIM cards.
The Side-Line service solution addresses the desire of many subscribers to have multiple phone numbers so as to easily separate their business and personal lives yet only wanting to carry one mobile phone. Subscribers can now receive calls for multiple numbers on their existing phone.
The service also provides subscribers with the flexibility of having incoming calls to these secondary numbers automatically forwarded to a separate and private voice messaging account versus receiving them live.
No new client software is required or new technology skills need to be learned by the user.
Subscribers can receive notifications of missed calls and new messages deposited for their virtual number on the mobile phone. The new message comprises an embedded link that allows a subscriber to play that specific message without navigating IVR menus.
The missed call notification comprises an embedded link that allows a subscriber to access the Side-Line service to return the call.
Consumer bank-card innovation
Winners: MTS and Intervale
Card service to pay for mobile, internet and other services
MTS-Pay is service to pay for mobile communication, housing and communal services, internet, TV and landline. The uniqueness of the service is the ability to use a banking card of any bank. MTS is rapidly expanding the list of partnering organisations that accept payment.
The service is available to all the subscribers of MTS and holders of bank cards of any Russian bank. The service is realized as the application on the SIM card.
The innovation of the service is the engineering solution, which allows the customer to register remotely the bank card and make payments 24/7.
The architecture of the service requires no special connection for the recipients of payments and does not depend on tariff or payment method. No additional commission is charged to the subscriber.
Location-based service innovation
Winners: Pelephone Communications and Telmap
GPS navigator for personal mobile location
Pelephone GPS Navigator is based on Telmap5 Mobile Location Companion, taking mobile navigation services to new heights. Telmap5 includes several innovative technologies that let mobile operators differentiate their service both from competitors and from free offerings, while allowing end users to personalize it and make it their own.
The first of these is Telmap Active Searc, allowing users to search through all available databases by entering a free-form single-line search term. New search databases can be added to the server on-the-fly and will automatically appear to end users without requiring any application upgrade or servicing.
Through Telmap Active Search, users of Pelephone GPS Navigator will have access to a local dynamic database for festivals and events.
Telmap Active Widgets takes this a step further. One user may personalise pedestrian navigation with a weather widget, while another may personalize mapping by displaying nearby Starbucks coffee.
Widgets can be provisioned seamlessly and on the fly thereby providing operators with an innovative way to keep their services up-to-date and differentiated by providing unique widgets in their offering.
Convergent billing innovation
Winners: Astelit and Orga Systems
Convergent billing for total marketing support
OPSC Gold meets operators’ need to offer attractive marketing campaigns and to be the first mover to skim the market.
The Ukraine market is highly competitive with very low revenue streams, high churn rates and weak service offerings. Astelit needed to gain the competitive advantage with a convergent billing system, enabling total marketing support, reducing opex and capex by using one single system for all customers and at the same time enhancing customer experience because all customer information is available in this one system in real time.
OPSC Gold enabled Astelit to offer new services within five days. Convergent services can be offered to the whole subscriber base. Customer experience has been boosted by making subscriber data available in real time, leading to dedicated and personalized offerings for any subscriber.
A key issue for the operators here is to be the first mover and skim the market as long as possible, to integrate third party content into the billing processes and to offer differentiated and advanced tariffs, bonus, discounts and lifecycles for new products.
Pay-as-you-go innovation
Winners: Vodafone and ZTE
Credit balance display
ZTE has developed and integrated a credit balance display feature for Vodafone Germany, according to the operator’s requirements.
This feature is about displaying the latest balance information in the idle screen of the phone at every power-up, at the end of a voice call, after sending an SMS, and in every periodic balance query.
If the feature is activated, in the idle screen there will be a balance icon, showing a credit balance such as €12.25, and the right softkey will be have a top-up function, using a voucher, from a bank account, or other method.
With this feature subscribers can easily know their balance and can easily top-up at any time. At the same time, it leads to a new cooperative way to help operator develop more added-valued operation.
Compared with the normal way in which third-party software is integrated, this offering allows the operator to directly cooperate with the terminal provider to customise all these added-valued operations, reducing development costs while, at the same time, adding flexibility.
TV service innovation
Winners: H3G and SeaChange International
Subscription TV on-demand service
On Demand Group’s Adrenalin technology allows 3UK to provide its customer base with the opportunity to keep up to date with their favourite TV programmes and video content on their handset, whenever they want to.
This fulfils the industry’s anytime, anywhere personal TV vision to provide the most desired programs to any handset with complete on-demand control.
Using the technology and numerous partner studios and programmer relationships, TV on Demand presents a mobile viewing experience that correlates to television and broadband PC viewing. It offers a variety of top-rated television shows both past and present, enabling subscribers to continue their enjoyment of complete programs while they are on the go.
Utilising the Adrenalin platform, On Demand Group has created a variety of opportunities for the operator, including the chance to deliver content in a converged environment by offering users personalised play-pause functionality across different television platforms.
Customers can access the service for a monthly subscription-based fee of £5 or an unlimited day pass of £1.49.
Airline service innovation
Winners: Aircell and Martin Dawes Systems
In-flight wi-fi internet service
Gogo transforms commercial US airliners into airborne wifi hotspots. Aircell won an FCC frequency licence in 2006 to build a mobile broadband network to deliver inflight internet. Launched in late 2008 as Gogo, the service became commercially available during 2009.
By February 2010 there were over 728 commercial airliners offering mobile broadband access to passengers in the US, including
all AirTran Airways and Virgin America flights, and select Air Canada, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and United Airlines flights. Continental Airlines and US Airways are coming in 2010.
Gogo is designed to be an on-board investment that generates additional revenue and can be paid off in a short time.
Martin Dawes Systems CRM managed service is integral to Gogo, giving passengers responsive service and access assistance when they need it from real people.
The equipment is lighter than three checked-in pieces of luggage and unobtrusive. Passengers access the service using their own wifi connected devices.
Martin Dawes Systems is responsible for managing Gogo’s point of sale, real time transactions, billing processes and CRM functions. In addition, it provides dynamic pricing selection and an integrated web chat facility that enables passengers’ choice on the type of offering and real time support from customer support agents.
Consumer voting innovation
Winners: TalkTalk and Huawei
Cost-free contestant voting for customers
A technology driven initiative to count and cap calls enabled TalkTalk to continue its commitment to provide customers with value for money by offering free votes to both TalkTalk customers and the general public.
TalkTalk identified a way to save subscribers’ expenditure in popular voting TV programmes through providing “free voting” for TalkTalk customers. This would lead to increasing brand awareness and emotional connection with TalkTalk’s customers.
After a series of discussions with ITV, the Dancing on Ice show became the first programme to adopt TalkTalk’s free voting scheme. However, one important consideration of providing free votes to subscribers was the risk that the network would experience a sudden and massive surge of call volume during the voting time period, potentially overloading softswitch equipment, and ultimately impact network performance.
Huawei who provided TalkTalk’s MSAN network and provided an overload control software solution for its access product. TalkTalk is able to sustain surging voice traffic during the free voting period while its customers still enjoy a high quality experience.
Editor’s award
Editor’s award for personal contribution
to the global telecoms industry
Winners: Keith Willetts of the TMForum
This is an award given by the editor to a person who has done more than most to stimulate innovation and development in the industry. Keith Willetts is chairman of the TM Forum, a hugely influential industry organisation built up over more than two decades. It has over 700 member companies around the world, and he has led and developed this extraordinary and influential organisation since it started, and continues to lead it.
Willetts’s award was presented by Tim Watkins, Huawei’s vice president for Europe, as sponsor.
Other sections
1: fixed infrastructure innovation
2: wireless infrastructure innovation
3: wholesale service innovation
4: business service innovation
All awards, with the exception of the editor’s award, were nominated by readers of Global Telecoms Business. The awards were sponsored by Huawei and ZTE, though neither company played any part in shortlisting or selecting the winners. GTB