From mobile banking to cloud solutions, innovative technology is transforming mobile operators into full-service providers.
Mobile phones are evolving, and telecom companies are evolving with them.
Today’s smartphones are as far from Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone apparatus as today’s land animals are from the first lungfish to drag itself from the sea onto the shore. Transmitting sound from one person to another is still a function of a modern phone, but arguably it’s no longer the primary one.
Audio is just one form of data, and today’s smartphones handle all types of data, in massive volumes. A smartphone is more than a telephone – fundamentally, it’s a mobile data transmitter, receiver and processor.
And as the telephone has evolved, so have the telecom companies. A modern mobile phone service provider is no longer concerned about managing the flow of electrons along telegraph wires (and the wires it does deal with are more likely to be fiber optic cables), but instead manages flows of data.
In the last decade or so mobile telephones have become end nodes in the vast global data transfer network of the Internet, and mobile operators have seen astounding growth in the range of services they can offer. Here are just a few of the areas in which we can expect to see rapid progress, transforming telecom companies into full-service providers.
Widening the data pipe
Acting as the connectors of smartphone “end nodes” to the wider Web, mobile operator, like Ukraine’s leading telecom company Kyivstar, have invested in faster and more reliable cellular communications networks to give customers access to the new possibilities generated by technology. Since 2015, Kyivstar has pumped over UAH 25 billion into developing its broadband cellular networks of the third and fourth generation standards – 3G and 4G. Over the same time, data traffic across its network has increased by an astonishing 2,500 percent.
Starting in 2018, when Kyivstar was awarded a 4G license, the company has been converting its network to 4G, and of its 28,000 base stations, 11,000 are already 4G-capable. Some 17 million of the company’s subscribers use mobile Internet – 54 percent of them using the 4G network.
Kyivstar’s 4G services now cover more than 11,000 settlements, home to over 80 percent of Ukraine’s population, and more than 90 percent of these settlements are rural. The company is now preparing to launch 4G services in the 900 MHz frequency band, making it possible to provide such services to 90 percent of the population, as well as on major highways.
The advancing generations of technology effectively “widen the data pipe” from a customer’s smartphone to the Internet, allowing more data to flow more quickly back and forth. Once that is in place, a lot of other possibilities suddenly open up.
“Office where you are” concept
One current possibility is the out-of-office working mode. The COVID-19 pandemic that hit the world in early 2020, forcing populations around the world into lockdown, meant that the idea of remote working for many companies shifted from a mere possibility into an essential requirement.
Kyivstar, partnering with technological giant Microsoft, has come up with a set of solutions that allow a painless transition from the physical office to the virtual. Any worker with a desktop computer, smartphone or tablet can access, share and sign documents in a truly paperless environment using the company’s StarDocs service. Keeping in touch with team members isn’t a problem with Microsoft Teams, available via Kyivstar, providing reliable and easy-to-use video conferencing. And using Microsoft’s Azure platform via Kyivstar gives companies access to secure cloud-based data storage and processing services. For the first time, operating a large company remotely from a virtual office has not just become practical, but even desirable.
Big data
Fast broadband – check. Cloud-based data storage and processing – check. What possibilities open up when these elements are in place?
The answer for companies like Kyivstar is Big Data. Modern communications systems transfer massive volumes of data, and the way that data flows generates metadata – or “data about data.” If you can harness these huge amounts of data and metadata, and have the processing power to collect, store and crunch all those numbers, amazing opportunities arise.
Although Kyivstar’s subscribers are primarily prepaid, meaning the operator knows neither name, age, gender nor income, analyzing the data they generate can reveal a lot of useful information – anonymous and non-personalized. That data is in turn useful to the other companies for creating marketing campaigns and other services.
As modern technology makes it possible to collect, store and process more and more information, Big Data will become the primary driver of business development and growth. Other companies will turn to telecoms providers for access to large data sets to grow their businesses, and the mobile operators will harness the data they collect themselves to provide new, innovative services.
Smart City
Big Data isn’t just proving a boon for business, however – it has the potential to improve the lives of city-dwellers everywhere. As city services get smarter – able to generate their own data and make it available on the Internet – so companies like Kyivstar can take that data, analyze it, and add their own Big Data into the mix to make those services more saturated.
One of the areas where Kyivstar is forging ahead with work to create a “smart city” in one of the Ukraine’s western cities. With the help of IT and telecoms technologies, city authorities have been able to improve transport, housing and communal services, and traffic signals. Public transport in the city can now be monitored via GPS in real time: vehicles can be located on a map and users find out the exact time a bus will arrive at a stop. This capability was implemented using Kyivstar SIM cards, which were installed in vehicles.
So in future, mobile operators will be able to harness the data generated by their networks to use in improving services in cities far removed from the realm of communications.
Mobile banking
Today’s smartphones are secure enough to provide a key to phone companies to unlock an area of business that used to be reserved for the banks – financial services. Using Apple Pay and Google Pay mean you don’t even need to carry a bank card with you to pay in some shops – just a mobile phone.
Mobile financial services aims to go a step further. The idea is that prepaid clients are able to use their mobile account balances to pay not just for their communications, but for other services as well. Using reliable financial partner payment infrastructure and systems, Kyivstar allows to conduct payment transactions at costs much lower than traditional card companies.
These services are just a sample of the ones telecom companies can already offer. As communications technology evolves further, new, as yet undreamed of possibilities will open up.
