21581 - SCTE Broadband August2022 COMPLETE v1

67 Vol. 44 No. 3 - September 2022 Issue technical Another trend that works against telecom operators’ business performance is the growing consensus that large data packages alone are fast becoming a commodity, including the fast Internet service on 5G. According to the latest Telecoms.com Annual Industry Survey, conducted in late 2020, half of the respondents (51%) believed that data has already commoditised, and over a third (37%) thought it would eventually become so 2 . This means telcos are finding it hard to charge a premium on the fast-growing data traffic going through the networks despite the heavy investments, and increasingly mobile operators are offering unlimited data packages. The second type of data carries critical information about the customers, the networks, the devices, and the applications – the type of data that The Economist famously called the world’s new “most valuable resource 3 .” While the focus of the following sections of this whitepaper will primarily focus on improving telcos’ efforts to get value from the second type of data, the benefits can also help address the issues they encounter when handling the first. Telcos should do better to generate much more value from the second type of data. Unfortunately for them, despite investing heavily to provide the so-called “last mile” connection to the Internet, they have been beaten to extracting the best value from the “new oil” by the Internet companies. The victors include both the Silicon Valley giants like Facebook, Google, and their peers, and many up-and-coming providers of Internet-based services. These companies have forged strong customer relationships and reaped high business returns while using the telecom operators’ networks. The challenge may come in different shapes. In some cases, telcos lack thorough visibility into all the important data. They may not be equipped with powerful enough tools to extract all the data, or the integration capabilities are not strong enough to aggregate data from multiple sources. On many occasions, however, the problem is not so much that data is not enough but that the available data is not being used well. This can be because the data exists in organisational silos that do not or cannot talk to each other. It may also come down to weak analytical capabilities to produce actionable intelligence. Sometimes the challenge may come from outside of telcos’ control, but it is up to those running the business to make the best of it. A recent example came in the regime of data protection regulations issued by authorities in different parts of the world, the most stringent is the European Union’s “General Data Protection Regulation” (GDPR). 2 Telecoms.com Annual Industry Survey 2020”, Telecoms.com Intelligence, 05 November 2020, https://telecoms.com/intelligence/telecoms- comannual-industry-survey-2020/ 3 ”The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data”, The Economist, 6 May 2017, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/05/06/ theworlds-most-valuable-resource-is-no-longer-oil-but-data What Customers Are Saying