The problems that software vendors must solve in support of 4G networks don’t differ much from one generation to the next, but they do become more acute. The following are pain points at which some leading vendors believe we should be aiming the palliative needle.
Despite an overall drop in mobile phone sales, smartphone shipments are growing at a 23 percent pace since last year, according to Ovum research, and that growth will continue at a 19.5 percent compound annual growth rate through 2014 when smartphones account for 29 percent of the handset market. Approximately 77 percent of the 77 smartphone models currently available are already equipped with GPS capability. And, in a serendipitous turn of statistics, mobile data revenue is expected to grow by 77 percent over the next five years, according to Informa.
These statistics don’t sound much like a point of pain, but when you consider that the cost of supporting consumers with smartphones is three times higher than supporting customers with traditional phones, and that that 77 percent growth in data revenue will require capacity increases of 1,088 percent, your margins begin to throb (see chart).
“Customer service reps have a tall task,” said Ben Geller, director of marketing and operations for Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive group, which provides software for configuring and supporting broadband devices. “As devices become more capable and feature rich they begin to look like mini mobile computers. The poor person answering the phone when a customer calls with a problem may have 25 to 30 applications in front of them and have to figure out what to use to find what amounts to a needle in a haystack.”
Although this is already a problem in need of a solution, 4G networks will compound the challenge for operators as consumers increasingly join enterprise companies as users of smart devices. As it did with DSL and other landline-based broadband services, the Motive group will try to “take the end-user out of the technology loop and give them easy access to applications that automatically configure their devices,” Geller said.
Doing that will come through what Geller describes as a crawl-walk-run scenario that starts with device management supported by the OMA-DM standard from the Open Mobile Alliance, then matures to include the service itself and culminates in a holistic service management approach for the device, the service and customer support.
