21 October, 2010

Broadband Wireless Access in Asia Pacific: From Opportunity to Profitability

This paper does not dispute the ongoing central importance of the network operators and their ability to command revenue on a utility model basis.

However, this model cannot deliver strong margins indefinitely. Differentiating the value of wireless broadband and gaining competitive advantage will require effective understanding and management of the key challenges surrounding establishing intelligence in the network, building of strong customer relationships, and working with the right new partners.

Successfully delivering a BWA offering requires operators to understand how the telco business has evolved and change the way they look at the traditional telco organization. Focus will need to be placed on understanding the corresponding need for business transformation across strategy, organization, and operations. When planning their BWA services delivery strategy, operators will also need to consider and address several key items:

Ownership of the core network remains central to provisioning highspeed broadband access to meet the demand for new applications and services via mobile devices. However, successfully monetizing the emerging new services will require movement beyond simply providing a “big pipe” access to broadband services.

Innovative business models will be required to monetize new bandwidth intensive services with operators needing to learn to work with content and service delivery partners in a far more open fashion to better extract and capture the value of their network.

The supply chain is becoming less linear with more participants involved to provide an increasing range of components, devices, and services. This increasing complexity has placed additional importance on vendor selection along with contract and partner management as Network operators broaden the scope of services for which seek to charge value-based pricing. Movement away from the typical silo mentality through Integration of the business side and the tecchnology side into a team with shared focus and priorities will be essential to respond to the challenges of successfully developing and delivering BWA services.