Big Data & Telecom
5.84 Million MNP requests made in January 2019: 09 month high.
119 crore subscribers in Sep 2018, competition is intense, fittest will survive.
Telecom Interconnection Charges to end by 2020, most calling to shift on Data.
Be ‘4th Industrial Revolution Ready’ with SkillUp Online
Telecommunications & Big Data
A study by McKinsey, Telcos: The Untapped Promise of Big Data, based on a survey of leaders from 273 telecom organizations, found that most companies had not yet seriously leveraged the data at their disposal to increase profits. And only 30 percent say they have already made investments in big data. Having said this, the telecom industry is poised to undergo a major transformation through deployment of ‘Advance Analytics’ and ‘Big Data’ technologies.
Telecom industry is one of the industries that has captured and transported volumes of information since it came about. Customer calling patterns, wireless data usage, location data, network bandwidth statistics, applications and web pages accessed are few to name. Big Data technologies has the capability to uncover the significant new insights about their infrastructure and customers.
Why Big Data cannot be ignored?
- Enhanced Customer Insights: With Big Data the telcos can easily turn the enormous structured and unstructured data into actionable customer insights. Big Data enables telcos develop enriched 360 custome profiles, establish customer centric KPIs and develop more targeted offers.
- Churn Prediction: Customer retention is a major challenge in the Telecom. Over 40% - 20% churn annually is a major hurdle as the telco’s spend a lot of efforts and resources to retain them. Predictive Analysis and machine learning algorithms use the collected data to enable operators predict the churn and take suitable pre-emtive actions.
- New Business Areas: Big Data helps identification of new business areas based on meaningful insights and also help build up competitive advantage coupled with more efficient cost structure.
- Business Optimisation: Big Data analytics provides telco’s with optimisation capabilities. This helps them increase revenue through better targeted marketing activities. It also helps them reduce costs by identifying expenses and revenue leakages.
Challenges
While growth of telecom industry over last few years has been stagnant due to declining revenues from voice-based services, however the growth in technology & innovation has be commendable.4G, 5G and IoT are new buzz words on the block. 5.6 billion subscribers are expected to be on the network. Is Telecom ready to handle such load?
- High Capital Expenditure: The industry is currently experiencing high capital expenditure to meet this growth in demand.
- Network Analytics: The most significant challenge Big Data faces is overcoming the process and political issues that hinder sharing of data efficiently among stakeholders and uncooperative vendors.
- Integrating IoT: IoT is still relatively green field for Telecom. Big Data needs now deal with Refrigerator, Speakers, Sound Systems and Temperature Control Systems alongside Smartphone.
Big Data to Combat Fraud
“We have tremendous amount of data that is generated every single second in a network,” said Dr. Volkmar Scharf Katz, Ex - Vodafone US inc, currently with Argyle Data. Argyle Data is working on former’s fraud analytics. He further said that the amount of data being generated is beyond human ability of comprehension. Fraud can impact a company’s brand and revenue. Adding to this , the fraudsters are getting more sophisticated as the days go by.
Dr. Ian Howells, CMO, Argle Data adds, “We are able to detect fraud that was not previously detectable and we are doing it in three to four minutes; what used to take 24 hours by looking at the problem as Facebook or Google would”.
Advantages of an upskilled Workforce
- According to “Telecoms Intelligence” 47% of the operators have done Big Data investments a few years back, but are still there is a huge shortage of talent. Telecom companies need Big Data Analysts who understand the technology of Big Data as well as business objective of the telecom company.
- As telecom operators face high network and spectrum costs along with intense competition, it would be ideal to upskill the current talent available.