Innovation is much more than just buying the latest technology. Innovation is the people involved in making innovation a successful process – both for a telecom company and for their customers. The following article provides operations insights and practical experience that Detecon has gained over the last few years in the Latin American market.

Initial situation
 

Compared to North America and Europe, the Latin American market is far from saturated and still has tremendous growth potential for subscribers, voice (ARPU, MoU) and data which are as yet only used rudimentarily.


Hence the focus and drive for the incumbents is still to gain as many subscribers as they can, as quickly as possible. They need to ‘hook’ customers up with their company before deregulation allows more competitors, new entrants and new technologies to enter the market. Hence network growth and ensuring sufficient capacity is still the paramount challenge. Less emphasis has been put on the ‘rest of operations’ such as customer care, service management and network management - it can almost be said that they have been neglected -because there is simply no need to fight for customers due to lack of competitive pressure.


Impacts on operations


In markets where dominant operators don’t face competitive pressure that in turn drives increases in efficiency, operations can suffer at the hands of the corporate culture inherent in monopolies.

Although these impacts on operations can be severe, they do not yet feel the urgent pressure to optimize internal organization, processes and networks. There is still time to get fit for competition: to become customer-focused and to move to a future-proof Next Generation Network (NGN) which is synonymous for a change to an open standard IP-based broadband multiservice platform. Finally, this will enable short innovation life-cycles, fast provisioning of high quality services, convergence of technologies and optimized network operations. This is a paradigm shift!




How to achieve the paradigm shift?


This recent statement from a CEO of a Latin American telecom company summarizes how to achieve the paradigm shift towards innovation. Have a holistic approach, and don’t just focus on network technology enhancements, since in the past this has not proved to be a long-term solution. To find out what is needed, how to do it, and in which sequence, basic and simple questions have to be answered anew. In our engagements, Detecon has observed that during a period of exuberant growth and almost no competition, important strategic decisions are easily overlooked, considered unimportant or sacrificed for growth.
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