December 15, 2016
Mobile services that can be delivered by “virtual” MVNO offerings are a natural complement to other hosted and virtualised offerings in the voice marketplace… reflecting the ongoing “cloud trend”. More mature MVNO offerings can deliver VAS services and SIP integration options that allow resellers to add high value, sticky mobile services to their customers’ bills, a far more sustainable revenue stream than simple airtime connection bounties. Once Resellers/CP’s have access to the customer mobile estate, other cross sell opportunities such as apps, data services etc all present themselves.
Traditionally, comms providers in channel markets have really only been able to act as sales agents for the main operators, gaining airtime and connection commissions for the services they sell. Whilst these upfront payments have historically been compelling, these are gradually reducing in value, and as the high street mobile market becomes commoditised it is becoming much harder for anything other than a specialised mobile dealer to offer any additional value to a customer beyond the operators own bundles.
Starting an MVNO is even easier
Until recently it has been difficult to access MVNO services unless you had deep pockets and a big team to handle an integration project with one of the big MVNE “enablers” who work on behalf of the mobile operators.
Now, Simetric Telecom is leading the way with a new MVNO model, as a white-label MVNO provider and integrator, with our 
Mobile-X service. We make it a realistic proposition for a reseller to easily add mobile services, with the important business PBX and VAS features pre-packaged, pre-engineered and ready to go - without the need for the deep pockets and big team!
In effect we've done all the hard integration work so that SIP/hosted PBX service providers don't have to. These providers can plug into Simetric using VOIP signalling and media protocols that they know and understand, and simple HTTP control API's that are easy to work with.
With integrated MVNO services under their own delivery models, resellers and CP’s can tailor offerings for their customers, bring services together on one bill, deliver proper convergence of voice services, and start to access the full residual value in the mobile services. With a customer fixed and mobile voice services, and potentially their fixed and mobile broadband data/M2M services as well, a reseller is in a very strong “sticky” position with a customer. It is not only hard for the customer to migrate away, but there are abundant cross sell/upsell opportunities, and if some product lines require pricing subsidies, this is far easier when multiple services are in play.
Differentiate your MVNO
However the real opportunities for resellers and CP’s in terms of additional revenues are not simply in being another mobile bundle “me too” player, or another re-branded SIM card player. Though this can clearly be effective for some channels, the operators themselves will always have a better deal and users may end up just “SIM surfing” your proposition like any other… you want to differentiate a little, add services to standout.
Add Fixed Mobile Convergence
We believe that being able to add specialised, integrated mobile services that deliver “proper FMC” are where the opportunities lie. This means being able to bring to the mobile things like PBX services, call recording, common billing etc – importantly, via the SIM which is a far more easy and reliable method compared to soft clients with their inherent technical and user experience complexities. These enterprise class business features can all be delivered now, including full international roaming and porting capabilities.
We believe that the challenges of packaging and integrating mobile services into FMC propositions can be easily overcome without having to do it all yourself now. But you need to chose the right partner who has sorted the integration into the fixed voice world, and avoid doing the technology yourself. We think that that is where the Simetric Mobile-X service really offers value as an off the shelf service.