MVNOs, it’s time to Moneyball with AI

As the USA’s Major League Baseball World Series nears, I'm drawn to the Moneyball story about the 2002 Oakland Athletics. I’m not a huge baseball fan, but the ethos of achieving a lot with very little echoes loudly. Like General Manager Billy Beane, who orchestrated a game-changing strategy on a shoestring budget, MVNOs too can rival big league MNOs with the help of AI, public cloud, and Totogi's solutions. Uncover how to channel this Moneyball magic in the telco realm in my latest blog.

Why do subscribers churn: network coverage or price?

Stetson Doggett of BestPhonePlans.net and CoverageMap.com shares insights into the customer journey, including why subscribers churn and why finding the right plan is overwhelming. Telco execs, this one is a must-listen!

Listen NOW to learn more: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TelcoDR website.

If you’ve seen this week’s blog?and my X profile, you know I was sidelined from going to MVNO Nation Live by a kidney issue I wouldn’t wish on Amdocs. But Team Totogi managed without me, and fingers crossed you caught our sold out working group session on how to conquer churn. If you missed it, DM me on X or LinkedIn and I’ll share the deets!?

And in the good news department, did you hear? The Telco in 20 podcast just took home a 2023 MarCom Award! I get super excited when other folks enjoy the show as much as I do. And this past year has been full of awesome-sauce episodes. Go check them out!

Ah, the old vendor lock-in debate with respect to the hyperscalers. I like to call this, “tell me how to use the public cloud without using the public cloud.” As I say in the article, picking your poison is a crucial decision for telcos. Telcos have to decide: is it better to get locked into a thousand tiny technical decisions (made by various people on your team) as you build a private cloud, or should you embrace the dynamic, rapidly expanding software capabilities of the public cloud? Taking the vendor-agnostic approach is building your own #fakecloud. I'd go a different route and bet on the public cloud. Why? Because it's evolving at a pace that's hard for other vendors to match (even RedHat). Remember, the hyperscalers spent $97 billion in CapEx in 2020 and close to half a trillion dollars in total. Their tech is improving faster than telcos and vendors can build. It's not perfect today, but think about where the technology will be in five or ten years. THAT’S the bet you’re making.

SK Telecom and Deutsche Telekom have partnered to craft a telco-specific Large Language Model?(LLM)?tailored to the particular needs of telecommunications companies. This LLM, slated for a Q1 2024 reveal, is part of the broader "Global Telco AI Alliance,"?and includes a partnership with AI-company Anthropic (which also has backing from Amazon, Google, and Meta). While the news doesn't mention what resources they will use to train this telco LLM (and they will need a lot of resources), my guess is that they will need to turn to the public cloud, which would give them a robust and scalable platform for deploying generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models, meeting the high computational, training, and inference demands effortlessly. Otherwise, they will need to procure a sh*t-ton of Nvidia GPU servers, which are sold out until January 2024. Man, I love this blog. I only wish I had written it! It’s chock full of advice on how to just get going with GenAI. You don’t need to build your own LLM to get great benefits, and it’s going to take time to experiment and get things going in your organization. Telcos, heed Bain’s advice: avoid analysis paralysis and just get started. How can you offer better online support? Why,?GenAI?of course! Here are three telcos working with Microsoft Azure to make it happen.?Lumen is using Microsoft 365 Copilot to quickly find policies and instructions to answer customer queries, summarize customer interactions, and more. (See the couple of paragraphs midway through the article.) Philippines telco?PLDT has deployed a voice AI solution called Talkbot Pro that delivers hyper-personalized customer experiences. Hosted on Azure Stack Hub, the bot has increased efficiency in the customer service organization, brought in more revenue, and streamlined backend ops. And Indonesia’s?Telkomsel has improved “Veronika,” its virtual assistant by integrating Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. The enhancement allows Veronika to offer more natural and intuitive interactions. If you’re not already attacking customer support with?GenAI (arguably the “no-brainer” area to apply GenAI), you’re falling behind. Get going now.

Ready to incorporate AI into your apps? AWS Bedrock is a great place to start. The team over at AWS has been hard at work trying to catch up to rivals Microsoft and Google on the AI front, and has been making slow and steady strides. This past week Bedrock got a big update, so if you tried it before and were unimpressed, it’s time to give it another shot. Get tips from Caylent, an early user. See the X thread and?blog post that walk from setup and usage, through what the company has learned, to guidance on how to effectively add Bedrock to your apps.

Are you playing with different LLMs? They definitely have their differences, and you may want to try different approaches for different tasks. Using this simple heuristic for choosing a large language model might be helpful. Personally, I use ChatGPT 4.0 for most things, especially now that it’s added “Browse with Bing” as an option. But Anthropic’s Claude is really great when you need precision and accuracy on older topics. What’s your favorite LLM? Send me a DM on X or LinkedIn and let me know. I’m trying to expand my LLM knowledge… ???

Which is better: AWS Code Whisperer or Microsoft’s GitHub copilot for coding? Over at Totogi and Skyvera we are trying to make our engineering and professional services teams more productive with AI: it brings our costs down for delivery and R&D, which we can pass along to customers. I found this (LONG!) write up comparing the two tools. We lean towards Code Whisperer because it accelerates our development with AWS, and for us that’s a big deal. YMMV, so give it a read and check it out.

Legacy wireless is facing cost optimization pressure, per Tim McDonald on X, who predicts that the most efficient network will eventually win. And according to him, that is… DISH Wireless, which is building a low-cost 5G network on AWS. If you missed it the first time around, catch my?podcast episode with DISH’s Marc Rouanne, where we talk about DISH’s approach.

J.D. Powers just ran its 2023 Telephone Service Customer Satisfaction Survey and determined that?in Japan, MVNOs are outperforming the traditional operators on overall customer satisfaction.?The imbalance is similar in the US, and in the UK. The J.D. Powers’ survey points to superior online support as one contributor to higher scores. If Stetson Doggett is right about networks reaching even parity and it no longer being just about coverage for consumers, customer satisfaction is going to matter more and more. MNOs—it’s time to step up your customer ?? game.

It’s not just MVNOs giving operators a run for their money.?SpaceX just launched a new website for its direct-to-cell services, which are slated to start next year. Text services should launch this year, with voice and data following in 2025. The satellites will get a ride to orbit on SpaceX Falcon 9 and Starship rockets, where they’ll connect to the Starlink constellation for global coverage. SpaceX also shared the list of operators it’s already working with: T-Mobile (US), Rogers (Canada), KDDI (Japan), Optus (Australia), One (New Zealand), and Salt (Switzerland).

Public cloud providers are actively working to make the internet MORE secure.?This Amazon Web Services post shares how its security team helped discover and defend customers against a new type of DDoS attack, the HTTP2 Rapid Reset Attack. Could your data center team do that? ??

Want some MVNO trivia? Did you know that the first MVNOs launched in Scandinavia and the UK around the year 2000 when the telco industry was rapidly evolving to serve the kajillions of new wireless customers? Now, 23 years later,?there are more than 2,000 MVNOs in more than 90 countries. That’s more than?double the number of traditional operators. Watch out MNOs, with all the new cloud and AI tech, these guys can use their nimble entrepreneurial speed to respond to market conditions faster than you can. With their focus on customer satisfaction coupled with the tech, it could upset the balance of subscribers between MNOs and MVNOs. Maybe that’s what places like Canada are so afraid of?

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