With price wars dominating the mobile market, MVNOs have to find a way to build customer loyalty and make sure their customers don’t flee when a better mobile offer shows up. Acquiring ‘cheap’ customers can be great for customer acquisition, but running after £10.00 customers should get MVNOs thinking and worrying about the long-lasting impact on their profitability and sustainability.

New mobile technologies are evolving at an accelerating pace, putting pressure on MNOs and MVNOs to find innovative ways to cost-effectively offer new services to their customers. In some ways, it is a paradigm shift for mobile operators. At one time, MNOs could base their business plans on offering a limited set of services that included voice and eventually text messaging. In that era, the principal competitive imperative was to build the largest network, with the largest geographical coverage, and with the best Quality of Service (QoS).

Out on the mean streets of consumer mobile, succeeding with an MVNO proposition is tough in a market where there is little to differentiate yourself on other than price. Whilst it may be a bloody business in the consumer world, B2B offers a different story. David Dungay went to find out how the Channel can add value to their propositions with MVNO’s.

As the profit and differentiation available from mobile services such as voice, messaging, and data decreases, operators need to look to what mobile analyst Chetan Sharma has termed the fourth wave^[1.] in order to open up additional lines of business and create additional revenue streams. 

When the mobile world meets next month in Barcelona to discuss how everything is mobile, Interop Technologies and our technology experts will be discussing how everything can be virtualized as well as we exhibit in Hall 1 Stand 1C02 at Mobile World Congress February 22-25.