As mobile service has become more ubiquitous and prices have come down, mobile in emerging markets has moved beyond the urban epicenters and into the countryside—yet these subscribers are dramatically different from their urban counterparts. Customers in more rural areas are less interested in bells and whistles on their devices and more likely to use their phones to support more basic needs such as communicating with family and friends, arranging for transportation and keeping up to date on the going rate for crops and livestock.

Both operators and device manufacturers have begun to adapt to the unique needs of these rural subscribers by evolving their product and service offerings. Handset vendors are developing more rugged devices able to withstand harsher conditions, as well as lower-cost devices, while operators have introduced applications and services developed to make life easier for rural subscribers. For example, in regions that lack the financial infrastructure of urban areas, operators such as Oi Brazil and Safaricom in Kenya have developed systems that allow subscribers to use their cell phones to make payments or transfer funds. China Mobile has developed a rural “information service platform” that provides up-to-date information on agriculture, healthcare and education to subscribers via mobile phone. In countries such as China and India, where the cities are filled with migrant workers from rural areas, operators have introduced roaming plans that provide those subscribers with a cost-effective way to call home.

As a result, operators in developing markets need to implement solutions that allow them to support this wildly diverse customer base. Their operational infrastructure must be able to handle not just the low ARPU, high churn and pent-up demand for advanced services in urban markets, but also the even lower ARPU of rural regions, as well as an often uneducated and illiterate customer base that lacks access to information, financial and transportation services.

Many operators have addressed this issue by adopting point solutions that target a specific issue, such as real- time charging to enable mobile money services in rural markets or policy control to better manage bandwidth consumption in high-traffic urban regions. While these solutions are often cost-effective and quickly implemented, they regularly create silos that increase the operators’ costs, require more manual intervention and frequently lack the ability to scale as

• An end-to-end service fulfillment system that enables agile service creation and provisioning, allowing the operator to quickly roll out new services in response to events and/or customer demand. By taking this approach, an operator could use the same system to deliver the latest hot content services for urban consumers while simultaneously deploying a mobile money service for rural subscribers without incurring the operational costs of maintaining multiple systems.
• A single virtualized product catalog that provides a basis for building multiple service offerings targeted at different customer segments
• A common interface to back-office systems that allows the operator to bridge its back end systems and provides a common interface to all systems.
• Self-service capabilities that support over-the-air provisioning and service changes, which helps urban subscribers avoid long lines at wireless stores and kiosks while making life easier for rural customers who often have no way to get to their operator’s closest service facility.
• Customer information management (CIM) capabilities that allow the operator to better understand its subscribers and target offers accordingly. As rural residents increasingly migrate to cities in search of a better quality of life, this capability becomes increasingly important, as it allows the operator to track the customer across his entire lifecycle, as well as potentially track his relationships and offer “family plans” or other service bundles. CIM can also allow the operator to do granular segmentations of its urban customer base and offer highly targeted products and services to those subscribers as a way to boost their ARPU.