By: Steve McIntosh

Today’s mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) have far more options for the types of services they can provide than merely the voice applications supplied by their predecessors. Mobile broadband, M2M, security applications, and digital content can all be provided via the MVNO model. But diversified offerings require far greater operational responsibilities: provisioning, service management, billing, and payment all become more complex as services do, and customer expectations of availability and high-quality experiences intensify.

Growing sophistication in the MVNO business translates to heightened requirements for mobile virtual network enablers (MVNEs). As a result, a next-generation infrastructure is now mandatory for MVNEs if they hope to operate in and keep pace with an accelerating and increasingly competitive mobile marketplace.

The early days

Pioneers in the MVNO industry segment had to fend for themselves when it came to creating effective operations. They spent significant capital and energy on building IT infrastructure from scratch that could oversee processes like order management, provisioning, activation, and billing. Many MVNOs sank under the weight of these IT burdens, or were unable to overcome the challenges well enough to conduct day-to-day business profitably.

Over time, MVNOs benefited from more mature IT offerings that pre-integrated the operational components they needed into substantial MVNE offerings. In other words, rather than piecing together IT components, they could access a suite of tools and processes that handled day-to-day operations, freeing them up to focus on identifying addressable market segments, marketing and selling their products and caring for their customers. MVNE platforms automated such aspects of the business as ordering-to-activation processes; billing, adjustments and payments; point-of-sale (POS) and customer-care interactions; and various transactions conducted with carrier partners, including accessing phone numbers, updating home location registers (HLRs) and collecting billing data from the switch.

Those early offerings focused primarily on fundamental MVNO services like voice, text and, in some cases, mobile data, but today’s mobile market is radically different, featuring more value-added and over-the-top (OTT) applications, more sophisticated mobile broadband services and more demands for new forms of billing and payment, from on-demand and real-time options to prepaid-postpaid convergence and more.

Approaches to IT have also shifted. Complexity adds costs, so MVNOs with on-site or highly customized hosted solutions feel the strain of the fixed costs embedded in their IT infrastructures. When coupled with changing and increasing requirements, these economic considerations contribute to why MVNOs need the next generation of MVNE capabilities to grow and adapt.