Customer loyalty is at an all-time low. Customer churn, the number of mobile customers switching providers every year, reached 44 percent last year, the highest level ever.* When operators need to replace churning subscribers, they incur another round of acquisition and retention costs, so subscriber churn has a direct impact on profitability in all markets, and the trend is even more pronounced in markets where handsets are heavily subsidized**. Subsidizing the latest and coolest smartphone models has in fact become a common way for operators to attract and retain customers, especially in mature markets. This has fuelled the success of smartphone vendors (Apple's overall profit margin is now approaching 30%!), but the same can’t be said for operators. Subsidization is a real drain on operator data revenue. Vodafone provides a case in point. Their OPEX figures, for Q1-Q3 2011, show that while other expenses decreased, ‘acquisition and retention costs’ were up by..

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What if customers in downtown Orlando can’t access their mobile Facebook or the connection gets slow? How long does it take for the mobile operator to detect it, prioritize it and fix it? According to a recent Acquisition and Retention study,  “network and service quality are highly prized by customers with 60% * of heavy users of mobile broadband expecting excellent network quality even if it costs a bit more”. Network and service quality have never been more important – operators just cannot compromise on service availability and quality. Unexpected outages and quality degradations are just out of the question. Bringing the new customer aware tools to bridge the gap Operators are exposed to a massive volume of data every day. The key challenge is how to handle the growing flood and complexity of data from today’s mobile broadband networks. And it is more challenging for operators to deliver continuous customer satisfaction, because..

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That fact that the annual LTE World Summit has recently established itself among the top events in the sector has really underlined the importance of LTE in our industry. It’s also a good opportunity to reflect about the LTE market development that we have seen over the recent years.  By April 2012 there were 64 commercially launched LTE networks, 70 per cent more than a year earlier. The last year has also seen the commercial launches of the first TD-LTE networks. The global adoption of both FDD LTE and TD-LTE is not a vision anymore, it’s a fact. Global scale fosters the development of the device ecosystem, which in turn drives subscriber figures. The LTE virtuous circle has accelerated.  The arrival of multiband/multimode USB dongles has enabled operators to migrate their mobile broadband large screen customers..

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TD-LTE cost effectively meets the pent up demand of Mobile Broadband and has global momentum with spectrum available in 110+ countries. China Mobile, Nokia Siemens Networks are partnering to commercialize TD-LTE – Making History with First 4G Network of China. China Mobile is laser focused on introducing 4G that is topping 100Mbps data rate to meet the pent up demand of its subscribers. Nokia Siemens Networks is the trusted partner that is delivering the stringent requirements cost effectively with top network quality and we are conducting large scale field trials of TD-LTE to create a robust 4G network for China and for the world.

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On the lookout for iconic mobile antenna designs, we, together with Aalto University, invited students to come up with ideas on how mobile antennas could look in the future. The winners of the active antenna design competition were announced on Thursday last week and the best design award was shared between teams Owl and Tetrix. The competition was a part of the World Design Capital Helsinki 2012 activities and saw 25 students in 5 teams from the Aalto University propose active antenna designs that are not meant to be hidden, but rather stand out as design pieces in their own right. Selecting the winner was tough for the evaluation panel that consisted of both design and technology experts from Aalto University and Nokia Siemens Networks. In the end, the best design award was shared between two teams, Owl..

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