5 Ways to Add Millions to Your Bottom Line This Year

Another problem that CSPs traditionally face is that the more traffic there is, the more optimization is required, according to Seth Greenberg with Mobixell. “This leads to an unending cycle of investment in optimization infrastructure that often does not properly address the real problem caused by ballooning data traffic--network congestion. Mobixell constantly monitors the radio and mobile back haul network to find predictive signs of congestion. Just before a flow becomes congested, optimization is applied to avoid congestion situations altogether. This addresses the congestion problem while also significantly reducing or deferring CAPEX investment in optimization infrastructure.”

2. Know Everything About Your Customers, Then Do Something.

Sure, providers know who their customers are, but what about real-time, real-world access to everything their customers are doing and experiencing? Communications technology solutions like Tektronix's are producing and communicating a vast amount of data on customers and their network activity. That kind of intelligence about customers offers golden opportunities to develop and market meaningful services to them.

“There isn't anything a customer can do from a voice or data perspective that we can't report about in real-time,” Hamze says. These rich call records are valuable when it comes to up-selling services and increasing ARPU.

But beyond managing network traffic and issues, the customer analytics generated by monitoring solutions, is a potential gold mine for marketers and retailers. Hamze uses the example of knowing how many iPhones are in use at the Super Bowl.

“That information might be really interesting to a pizza company that wants to send out a special offer to iPhone users at the Super Bowl,” Hamze adds. “You can slice and dice that collected customer data in any direction.”

Privacy issues are avoided by “normalizing” or stripping out subscriber ID numbers and any additional personal information. Providing that normalized usage data to marketers is one potential revenue generator for any provider.

Infovista is an example of a communication technology provider adding value through improved business services for customers.

“Our customers are leveraging the solution to gain market share by differentiating business services with their competitors,” Cyril Doussau de Bazignan, the Director of Product Marketing at InfoVista says. “Service quality visualization is becoming the new battleground and performance assurance intelligence can be sold as add-on offers like real-time performance assurance and application visibility services."

What's the difference between an OTT provider and a telco? The network. And as the cost of connectivity rises, the pressure for providers to better monetize the network rises too. The key, according to Accanto Systems' Michele Capriani, is that providers need a traffic asset to provide services on top of that connectivity.

“On top of service assurance solutions, we are starting to leverage data in partnership with service providers to provide revenue-generating services,” Campriani adds.