The Hindu Business Line : Vying to add value

Telecom operators are slowly moving beyond tariff battles. The turf's getting hotter and one can beat competition only by offering more layers of service - through M-business solutions. And the players are wasting no time in piling on the goodies!

BHARTI Tele-Ventures, mostly known as a cellular operator, has a pilot vehicle-tracking project going for a Bangalore-based company. The company can locate its stock in transit with the help of Airtel mobile phones fitted on to its vehicles.

The phones are not fitted with the ordinary SIM card that an ordinary Airtel retail subscriber would use, but with a vehicle-tracking-enabled SIM card that sends periodic updates of the location of vehicles to a central application server. The movement of the vehicle is shown on a map for the company which can now simultaneously track all its vehicles.

"In remote areas where we may not have our mobile networks, we use a global positioning system (GPS) box instead of an Airtel mobile,'' says Manoj Kohli, who heads the entire mobile division at Bharti Tele-ventures.

Bharti has also provided another customer with yet another mobile application — one for sales-field automation. Here the customer's Web-based applications and ERP systems are put on a wireless platform so that the field force of the company can have access to information on their AirTel mobile connections.

Getting serious about strategy

There are several other mobile applications for the business sector that Bharti is experimenting with. Collectively referring to these applications as M-Business Solutions, Manoj Kohli, President, (Mobility) with Bharti Tele-Ventures, says the days of tariff obsession for telephony operators will soon come to an end.

"We are going beyond deal-cutting,'' he says, referring to what has constituted serving the business sector until today — simply offering discounts to bulk subscription to mobile services.

Simply, these application-cum-telephony services ensure bulk usage by corporates and mean more income for the operators by way of the customised or value-added services provided. In some cases, it is for the operators' direct benefit as well.

The telecom audit tool, another application launched by Bharti, helps both the customer as well as the operator to jointly analyse current telecom expenses and usage patterns to pinpoint the areas where costs can be saved and further to identify `best-fit' tariff plans.

AirTel also provides a routing solution where calls made by corporate employees can take the least-cost path, such as through a GSM interface fitted into the `board line' system of the company. For example, cellular-to-cellular long distance calls being cheaper, employees would simply dial a number through which they would access the GSM interface on their board line if they are going to dial another cellular phone from their office. This would save the office a costlier landline-to-mobile long distance call.

The company says it is also open to suggestions for requirements from corporates, such as customised SIM cards for particular user groups within corporates, creating a kind of virtual private network.

Talking of Tally...

Other telecom operators are also doing the same thing. "We are not providing casual applications,'' says Prakash Bajpai, President, Reliance Infocomm, of Reliance's very new product-cum-solution introductions in the market.

One of the products, which the company claims is the first of its kind in the country, is called Tally Data Phone. This creates a virtual private network for users of Tally, India's home-nurtured largest selling accounting software (which in turn claims that it sells more than all the other accounting software in the market put together). Tally Online, the online accounting software service from Tally, would be available automatically through the Tally Data Phone to different users of the same establishment who would then be on a virtual private network, all using Tally. The phones work on the 3G CDMA 1x network and need no wiring to set up.

"Through this single product, we are offering networking, software application and telephony, all at one go,'' says Bajpai. The phone looks like an ordinary telephone with a sleek antenna and has a display screen; the phone has to be simply fitted to the computer being used by the user by a set of paired wires which provide Internet access.

"We are into serious business applications,'' says Bajpai. Reliance is working on sales-automation software and a few other applications for specific use by business communities.

Reliance's other introductions, the fixed wireless phone and fixed wireless terminal, are aimed at both the residential market as well as the tiny sector and perhaps the small office home office (SOHO) sector. Here the phone can do multiple functions. It can be used as an ordinary telephone for voice calls, it could be connected to a fax machine, or it could be simply connected to the computer and used as an Internet access device, or, more interestingly, connected to a small PABX which would then function like a multiple-board line, but using the CDMA technology.

Taking the cue

Tata Teleservices too is introducing fixed wireless phones based on the 3G CDMA technology which allows for data access. Although the company (like most of the first lot of basic service licensees) has deployed fixed wireless telephones in some of its circles, these were mainly due to the remoteness of the area to be serviced or due to geographical difficulty in laying wire lines. The earlier technology was not capable of supporting data services either.

Tata Teleservices has tied up with group company Tata Infotech for research work on wireless applications, the research to be conducted at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai. Tata Teleservices has already entered the Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) space, providing total Wi-Fi solutions for corporates or establishments who would want wireless Internet access.

"It is an encouraging move on the part of the access providers although they ought to have entered this business much earlier. It is still very late in the day that these data services for business applications are being introduced in the market,'' said Kobita Desai, Telecom Analyst with Gartner, on the sidelines of the recent Gartner Summit. According to her, it is data applications that are helping to shore up many telecom companies' sagging revenues, dragged down largely by falling Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). "The contribution of data services to the total revenues of telecom companies in some countries in South-East Asia is increasing. And since data services cost more, the revenues have not fallen as much as they could have with falling ARPU from voice calls.''

Indian cellular companies too have been complaining of steadily falling ARPUs. With the cellular base largely increasing due to the growth of the low-end pre-paid section, revenues are hardly anything robust to write home about. "In any case, even if revenues from the prepaid section are robust, they would be slow in coming from individuals,'' says the marketing head of a cellular services company.

Mobile service providers have been quietly hiking tariffs for certain services after incoming calls to the mobile became free and threatened a further fall in revenues. Mumbai private operators now charge Rs 2 per SMS to their prepaid users. However, hiking SMS charges (SMS is a data service) is hardly noticed, it is the call tariffs that attract more public attention, notes the above-mentioned marketing head. In fact, he admits that income from SMS services has considerably increased, especially when operators conduct sport or film-related SMS contests.

A dramatic expansion of the retail subscriber base is encouraging from a very long-term point of view only. "The addition of retail subscribers is always a matter of pride. However, they come at a cost. We require more base stations, better customer service every time we add on subscribers. And when is all this investment going to bear fruit? We need to do something that works faster,'' he says.

It looks like telephony companies will next be providing VPN for families or something, going by the way they are ferreting about, looking for business, says the Chief Operating Officer with a mobile company.

kripram@thehindu.co.in

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