By
Torbjorn Ward
In today’s competitive economy, customer retention is a high priority for service providers looking for new ways of not only sustaining revenue, but for generating new opportunities as well. Unfortunately this critical audience – your key “bread and butter” base, on whom you’ve already spent valuable marketing dollars convincing, and winning, their business – is constantly being courted by competitors looking to expand their marketshare.
And customers are responsive to these pitches. They are constantly reevaluating their service and are on the lookout for a better deal. Also, not too far on the horizon is mobile broadband offered by the wireless carriers using advanced high speed broadband technologies, which will become a viable alternative to fixed broadband technologies such as cable, DSL and fiber and is potentially opening up a new field of competitors to the fixed broadband Internet operators of today.
So, how can you keep existing customers, now and in the future? Especially when new services, options, even lower priced alternatives are constantly being trotted out by competitors?
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It makes sense for service providers to offer wireless Internet as a competitive differentiator to alternative services. The demand is there. |
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recently at 4G World that they want 90 percent of their electronic products to wirelessly connect to the Internet by 2011. The general public is mobile as well, making wireless broadband one of the highest priority services available. It makes sense for service providers to offer wireless Internet as a competitive differentiator to alternative services. The demand is there.
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Wi-Fi, or wireless Internet access, is fast becoming a critical customer retention tool. It’s being proven successful by some of the largest cable companies and service providers here in the U.S. and abroad. It is quickly proving to be a great way to keep existing subscribers interested in the whole of a service provider’s offerings, and maintain their loyalty even when new offers – even lower-priced competitors – are knocking at their front doors.
Think of it: workers are going mobile in increasing numbers. iPhones work fastest on Wi-Fi, which makes that preferred by users; laptops with built-in Wi-Fi are everywhere. In fact, literally any device will soon be networked. For instance Sony stated
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No wonder people generally feel that their iPhones, laptops or other mobile devices seem to breathe new air of speed when connected to Wi-Fi – the 54 Mbps version (802.11g) has been around for several years and many new devices are sporting the latest addition, 802.11n, which can bring speeds of several hundreds of Mbps. The current offering by the wireless carriers using cellular technologies is a far cry from these speeds. Furthermore, many fixed broadband service providers have a very high capacity core and backbone network just waiting to connect to the faster wireless end-points that Wi-Fi can offer.
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