Playing with new app services will help operators create new revenue streams outside of the struggling minutes market
Mobile World Congress: Risking failure through experimentation with value added apps and services is a necessity for today’s mobile carriers, if they want to stay relevant to consumers and small business users, said an executive from the fring Alliance.
Roy Timor-Rousso, general manager at the Fring Alliance, told Smart Chimps that playing with new app services will help operators create new revenue streams outside of the struggling minutes market. “This is what carriers need to do to stay relevant with consumers and small office, home office (SOHO) users,” he noted. He added that carriers need, “to change their revenue [to a model]which isn’t based on minutes”.
Timor-Rousso added, “for carriers, the revenues from termination has gone,”. He continued: “Once they [understand]that, they can begin to experiment in new development paths that are not based on minutes. You cannot afford not to experiment.”
Genband acquired fring’s over the top (OTT) mobile IP comms service in 2013, to expand on its consumer cloud portfolio; later the company created the fring Alliance to create more value for carriers. Now, the fring Alliance is building a federation of OTT carriers to enable operators to innovate and find new revenue streams.
Here in Barcelona, fring Alliance has announced the launch of its first suite of Revenue Engine Applications. The first four apps of this catalogue of services include in-app advertising, payments, federation and user generated creative experiences.
Timor-Rousso warned however that, “these are the first batch of apps. I think they will be successful, but you might see one that fails in Australia being incredibly successful in the UK, I don’t know. But this is what carriers need to do.”
Also in Barcelona, Genband is talking about Max, Bulgaria’s first provider of 4G LTE mobile services, which has selected fring’s whitelabel telecom OTT solution, powered by Genband’s platform as a service, Kandy, to launch its next generation Voicer app. Voicer enables users to connect via voice, video and text, both over Max’s 4G LTE networks and over other available connections including 3G and Wi-Fi.
