Monetizing Fixed Wireless Access

If the mobile industry was a pop–group, then 5G would be that album that promised a new direction but simply didn’t land with the fans. You know the picture. The first album had the wow, followed by the deeper, more meaningful 2^nd album release. Then the 3^rd live album, the 4^th with a new “edgy” sound and then the build-up and promise to that 5^th album that would pull all of that together into a new statement of directional intent and then, disappointment.

I could go on with tales of the band splitting up or separating with their promoter and management team, but let’s just say that amidst the disappointment, there were some standout tracks on that album, one of them being fixed wireless access.

From one perspective, monetizing fixed broadband offerings should be the bread and butter for any telco, having been a portfolio offering for many years. Beneath that, though, lies a fundamental challenge. When considered on a standalone basis, any broadband offering quickly becomes difficult to value differentiate and trends to commodity, distinguished simply on price.

The way out of that for most telcos has been to provide converged offerings that typically consist of broadband, fixed voice, mobile and TV services. This “quad-play” bundle of services, on the positive side, has resulted in a greater share of wallet spend and customer stickiness. The challenge is that to make bundles attractive, one or more of the services must take a cut in margin, which may not be attractive to any P&L business owner of that service. Also, consumers have become smarter at renewal time and know how to gamify with renewal teams to drive pricing down even further.

Maybe bundling has become a victim of its own success. While it brought together portfolio elements, it offered no integration value between them and established price as the fundamental trading currency. Time for a re-think.

So, how does fixed wireless access change that?

If you consider the premise that customers don’t “buy” fixed or mobile broadband (what they are actually buying is multimedia access to whichever service they want from whatever location they are in), then you begin to look at the opportunity from the outside in. You are taking a walk in the customer’s shoes as opposed to selling individual technology elements to them.

What if telcos looked at families as a hub-and-spoke arrangements, a central hub representing the home location and spokes representing multiple, random mobile devices? Essentially, this would be an integrated mini-network. Both the hub and individual spokes potentially have different service requirements that could be based on capacity, parental control, telecommuting needs, security, type of device, singular or multi-device access, mobile and/or wi-fi mobile access needs, amongst others.

From a bottom-up perspective, the fact that fixed wireless access and mobile services are delivered from the same mobile network, are monetized by the same converged charging engine and have a common unit of currency in volume usage opens up the potential for better service integration in that hub-and-spoke arrangement.

Turning that foundational integration into a top-down, value-oriented service is where the real smarts lie.

The creation of a pooled set of services and flexible usage/capacity terms across the family “hub-and-spoke”—controlled from a single pane of glass digital app, where capacity and service allocation changes and feature changes such as QoS, parental control and telecommuting needs can be flexibly controlled—turns the former network-centric bundle into a customer-centric lifestyle service.

That fundamental shift moves the relationship between the telco and a family unit from one exercised along a price-driven continuum to one where value dominates. Yes, of course, pricing remains important but breaking the mold and moving away from technology bundling to an integrated lifestyle offering makes a fundamental difference to the profitability and true stickiness of such offerings.

In many ways, fixed wireless access acts as a catalyst for new thinking around how best to captivate a consumer audience as part of an integrated, customer lifestyle approach to service delivery and not just a standalone broadband service.

Maybe that 5^th album had a tune in it after all.

Get more details on how operators can get the best out of monetizing fixed wireless access.