The GSM Sun Shines At Cannes

The GSM World Congress celebrated its 12th anniversary and continues to grow as does the GSM, which more than doubled to 66 million subscribers from 30 million world-wide, last year.

Termed as the second most glamorous event held in Cannes, the French Riviera city of festivals, the 1998 GSM World Congress held during 17-19 February witnessed the best of sun, flowers, and sea when the chairperson of GSM MOU Association, Dr (Ms) Adriana Nugter proclaimed, "From its 31 percent of world’s total wireless market today, GSM would like to achieve 50 percent of cellular market by 2001, i.e. 265 million subscribers." The end of 1998 is expected to see 100 million GSM subscribers (last year this figure was expected to be achieved in 2000).

Palais des Festivals, Cannes: the venue for 1998 GSM World Congress

Repeating once again its success, the Congress with record number of delegates, believed to be close to 3,000, debated many subjects and issues, including marketing initiatives for customer acquisition (prepaid, channels, retailing, pricing), loyalty (churn, subsidies, relationship, and service issues), innovations in handsets and SIM cards, GSM-fixed integration, mobile data and preparing for information age, GSM 1800, Camel/IN services, satcom, third generation UMTS, and various other technology issues.

Pre-paid Gets Rewarded Again
Like last year’s award going to TIM of Italy, this year’s GSM marketing success award went to another pre-paid success, i.e. Vodacom of South Africa, for its "Vodago" pre-payment service (based on IN platform) which has taken telephony to rural areas, many using GSM to make their first telephone call. In the panel discussion on pre-paid, Tushar Maheshwari, from our own AirTel, mentioned "anonymity" and "bill insecurity—fear of unknown" as key factors behind the success of pre-paid, supported by other panelists from Italy, Portugal, and Belgium. Roberto Pellegrini of TIM was not worried about churn: "In 15 months over six million users; if churn exists, so what?"

Rural application also received the Best Technical Innovation Award given to Airnet Comm. Corp. (USA) for cost-effective solutions for rural advanced digital services. Among other recognitions were Entel of Chile for being the first GSM operator in South America and KG Telecom of Taiwan for Best GSM TV commercial entitled "Harvest Festival" showing a tribal chief singing for a traditional dance from his hospital bed, on a GSM phone: international roaming, technology, and tradition all rolled into one.

Mobile Data Opportunity
Mobile data is considered a huge opportunity to increase airtime revenue. Internet is considered the best way to fill the data pipe as every mobile phone is a potential web-browser. In the world, wherever mobile operators are in dominant position, like Vodacom in South Africa, Internet is added just as a brand-extension. The results of a survey, that 38 percent of the mobile phone users want to use mobile data and 2 percent actually have it, created a heated debate, the survey being a cross among industry co-operation—notebook computer, mobile phone, and datacom players. It was emphasized that operators need to make more use of simple value-added services like Short Message Service (SMS) which can be used as the fastest way to access E-mail and even billing information. There were suggestions to use SMS for games and lotteries. New SIM card-enabled applications, electronic cash authentication, and, soon, Java, are expected to take mobile data beyond its current position of primarily E-mail and fax. However, security, data rates, and costs are matters of user concern. There is a great deal of interest in mobile multi-media with third generation systems still four years away.

 

Mobile Commerce Is The Future
Kevin Duffey of Logica summarized, "Retailers and banks will use the mobile phone as a retail outlet in customers’ pockets. Mobile operators will enjoy increased customer loyalty, as customers come to value the mobile phone as much as they do their wallets today."

Encouraged by Cellnet-Barklaycard alliance’s grand success story (a vision of ATM in pocket), a dozen GSM operators are in various stages of launching mobile commerce. The subscriber should be able to buy shares, cinema tickets or even pay for car wash using his mobile phone. The need for smart phones was emphasized, the latter to reap the benefit of Internet too. In this respect, Alcatel’s latest mobile phone "One Touch Com" was the cynosure considered as the world’s first pocket-sized Smart Mobile Phone integrating GSM phone and organizer into a light weight device ideal for Internet and E-mail access.

Alcatel One Touch COM, a mix of advanced digital cellular technology with the latest personal information management and Internet
E-mail access systems.

Corporate Users
Volvo spends one-third of its communications cost on mobile calls, Price Waterhouse about 20 percent. It is becoming essential to fully integrate PABX and mobile phone (and even VPN) whereby mobile operators can offer special tariff schemes to corporate users (someone mentioned a flat one-fourth of the standard tariff). In addition, a lot of management information services and tailored solutions can be added like on-line budget control (bill-splitting by cost centres), corporate messaging (including fax/E-mail), etc. For corporate users besides integration of IT and telecom, it brings in most intelligent and least-cost routing for usage optimization.

During an interactive question-answer session, when delegates were asked if they were asleep, a few pressed the buttons answering in affirmative. Nevertheless, for most, it was once again an event to be remembered, not to forget the gala dinners and cocktails, for which the organizers need to be congratulated.

NIRAJ K GUPTA, from my cell, Voice & Data, March, 1998.