Alepo USA

  In recent years, WiFi has evolved from a luxury to a basic necessity. This change is driven by the following ingredients of success — it is free (most of the time), it is widely available, and it connects us to the world. In fact, I would go out on a limb and say that WiFi should now be included in the bottom layer of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, right next to food, water, and shelter. For service providers, th i s proliferation has been a bitter-sweet experience. On one hand, WiFi provides a means to ease network congestion caused by heavy data users (or as it is commonly called,  WiFi offload ). On the other hand, it becomes difficult to attach a monetary value to this widely-available benefit. As a CSP, you have to not only maintain QoE for your users but also compete for market share against unsecured public WiFi and other low-cost service providers. To top it off, most people expect WiFi to be a free service. This leaves very few methods to  monetize WiFi , making ...

  Every day, the mobile money industry processes over $1 billion and generates direct revenues exceeding $2.4 billion yearly, according to GSMA’s 2017 State of the Industry report. In fact, mobile money transactions in Kenya have now exceeded the country’s gross domestic product according to estimates by ICTworks. No small feat for a platform introduced a little over a decade ago in the African nation where today, five operators coexist.   The poster child of mobile money success, Kenya demonstrates the massive scope for the platform as an enabler of economic growth.  Mobile money  has enabled financial inclusion of millions of people by empowering them with digital financial services.   Without taking away from its unparalleled success, it is important to note that mPESA – at the forefront of Kenya’s mobile money revolution – entered a largely unbanked market, with minimal competition, relied heavily on agents for transactions, and used first-generation, featur...

When was the last time you used paper money for anything? That thought crossed my mind as I was giving my daughter her weekly pocket money, in notes and coins of course. As someone who’s worked for the last decade on mobile financial systems, the irony didn’t escape me. Why is it that I give my kids pocket money to instill the habits of budgeting and saving — that is, getting ready for the real world — but still provide them with physical money they store in the piggy bank their grandparents bought them? Wouldn’t it make more sense to teach my children how to manage digital money, which I firmly believe is the future of all money? I’d ra t her not open them a bank account or introduce them to the mobile wallets I use — I am not  that  modern a father. I want them to learn and have fun doing it, but I’d still like to view and control their activity. And I would like their relatives to be able to play a part, just as easily as they would have dropped a coin in their piggy bank. ...

  We all know that functionalities such as billing, rating and charging, customer experience, customer care, CRM, fulfillment, and revenue management are handled by  Digital Business Support Systems (BSS) . A digital BSS stack goes beyond these functions to facilitate enabling, monetizing and managing a new class of digital services and partner collaboration. It helps transform a communications service provider (CSP) into a digital service provider (DSP) and is essential for the transition to 5G. Here, we analyze how a robust growth-enabling  digital BSS Transformation solution  can become a profit generator. Predicting customer churn Telecom com p anies can leverage advanced analytics to seek value from data residing in the BSS, OSS, and  CRM , among others. By leveraging data gathered from customer usage, transactions, complaints, billing, and social media, predictive models can be built to identify potential churners. This, in turn, helps telecom companies ro...

  Telecom operators, in the past, relied solely on fixed-line services for generating revenue. The industry has since taken great strides. Operators have developed various innovative services that empower customers to look beyond voice and SMS and explore streaming video, maps, music, and many more data applications. The opportunities created for customers have enabled operators to plunge into new services. Today, quality customer experience plays a major role in generating revenue. In this customer-centric era, operators are driven to promote timely personalized offers and deals at attractive price ranges. With the rise of service offerings, operators face tremendous pressure on their billing platform. The need to enhance the capabilities of the  BSS stack  has become as significant as improving network capacity from time to time. Why should telecom operators upgrade their billing systems? Telecom operators have put billing systems on the front burner for driving the ini...

  The Way Things Were, Is the Way Things Are. Even as mobile plans continue to evolve and become increasingly more unique, the majority of internet service providers (ISPs) in the world are still offering the same plans they were offering 20 years ago: flat-rate, monthly plans with a specific QoS (bandwidth speed) and unlimited data. ISP offers are simple because that is what customers have traditionally demanded from ISPs. The customers seem happy with what they are receiving, and ISPs don’t see any reason to fix what isn’t broken. Or Are They? However, internet us a ge has changed, as the adoption of streaming and other over-the-top ( OTT ) apps continue to increase. Gone are the days of simple browsing. Internet usage has become a bandwidth-straining practice encompassing a wide range of OTT apps including YouTube, Netflix, Hulu and many more. This diverse, but consistently draining usage can create a strain on provider networks, which may already find it challenging to distingu...