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For telecommunications carriers who are considering the prospect of adding the Triple Play to their networks (voice, video and data), the lure can often seem more like Pandora’s Box than low-hanging fruit. While the Triple Play comes with the promise of increased profits and customer loyalty, it also comes with a certain level of risk: Adding complexities to the network could end up taxing resources, increase customer churn and ultimately drag profits down in the end.

One way to mitigate this risk is to develop a strategic approach that uses location intelligence as its focal point. By analyzing location data at the outset, a provider can form a Triple Play strategy based on what makes the most business sense. It can make decisions not by chance or feel or competitive pressure, but rather base its decisions on answers to a key set of “Where” questions, which might include:

Where are our current customers? Where are our best potential Triple Play customers? Where are our network assets? Where are shared network boundaries and operating centers, and how can we leverage them? Where do our competitors do business? Where are our competitors vulnerable? Where are we vulnerable to competition?

There are few industries today in which location is as important as it is in the telecommunications sector, but all too often carriers make decisions about new markets or new services to offer without taking a close look at all the location factors that come into play. Location is ingrained in almost every operation and opportunity—whether it is a customer’s address, a competitor’s hold on a market opportunity or the placement of a central office. Yet, this information is rarely accessed, let alone maximized to its potential, and carriers run the risk of experiencing fleeting success with the Triple Play should they ignore the importance of location.

In this article, we will explore how a sound location analysis strategy can enable carriers to move intelligently beyond a “build it, and they will come” deployment strategy and increase their potential for success when going for the Triple Play.

Location intelligence opens up a whole new dimension of analysis to key strategic areas such as market-driven network planning, product planning and new service roll outs. It can provide a bottom-up view of geographic and market regions and enable carriers to generate real-time forecasts of adoption rates for products and services, all based on localized economic and growth factors.

The science of predictive analytics combines demographic, psychographic and cluster analysis data, and then merges it with location information. The resulting dataset allows a carrier to obtain location-driven answers to questions about demographic, competitive and behavioral characteristics, as well as regionalism, growth factors and other factors proven to influence consumer behavior and unit performance. In the context of the Triple Play, predictive analytics provides an accurate view of the types of households and business customers that would most likely subscribe to a proposed new Triple Play service, such as video over DSL.

But in addition to being able to pinpoint the best places to offer a Triple Play service according to market potential, location is also very important when it comes to analyzing network resources; proper analysis in this regard lets carriers match internal resources with projected adoption rates for a given market, and thus enables them to make more accurate decisions about current capabilities, as well as return-on-investment for additional build-out, prior to making the investment.

By creating a location “blueprint” that identifies, targets and prioritizes where to focus efforts, predictive analytics fosters more informed decisions related to build-out, new service offerings and ROI. Ultimately, location intelligence allows a carrier to predict its ROI in infrastructure, and to forecast trigger points for growth based on realistic sizing and timing projections going forward.

If a carrier wants to add video, wouldn’t it be helpful if it could base its marketing and growth strategy on where competitors do or do not have a foothold, and vice versa? Or wouldn’t it be great to focus Triple Play efforts only towards geographic areas that have the greatest density of high-value potential subscribers?

There are a number of dynamics influencing the above examples that carriers will simply not be able to see without doing a thorough location analysis. These include:

• Competitive landscape: Which cable companies are operating within specific telephone network boundaries, how many customers do they have in those areas, which services do they offer and what is their pricing model?
• The network infrastructure: Where are the existing telephone network area and assets--such as central office locations with CLLI code, rate center boundaries, wire center boundaries, DSLAM locations and fiber-lit buildings--and how can we leverage that infrastructure to offer the Triple Play?
• Customer potential: Where are our current voice and data customers physically located, and where are the concentrations of high-value potential subscribers to our planned Triple Play service. Where do these groups intersect?

At the very least, knowing the location components of the preceding variables would make it easier to establish an effective marketing and growth strategy. But the issue goes deeper than marketing alone. By using location data to create a multi-layered visual map, a carrier can perform a detailed up-front analysis of the market area where it intends to offer video services and paint a more vivid picture of the business opportunity as a whole.

Here is how location analysis might play out in a simulated scenario where a carrier wants to pinpoint a central office (CO) with the greatest market potential for video over DSL services.

First, a carrier would create a map showing the major roads and highways in the market area. Then, it would layer on the location of all the CO’s within the area. Next, the carrier would drop in customer location data, including its own customers and customers held by the competition, to identify the total number of cable customers and high speed cable modem customers located within the market area.

Now, by looking at the area within an 18,000 foot ring around each selected CO, the carrier can quickly and accurately see the market opportunity for video over DSL from each one. This equation would show potential revenue, ROI from the service itself and capacity requirements for each CO. Moreover, this action would help the carrier design a targeted marketing campaign that reaches out only to potential customers within the covered area.

Taken as a whole, evaluating all of the available location intelligence better equips carriers to 1) make high-impact business decisions regarding new services and market expansion, 2) invest in network resources based upon real customer potential and 3) deploy an effective marketing campaign that costs less and increases results compared to mass marketing efforts.

Location analysis also comes into play for carriers offering VoIP, to ensure accurate handling of 911 traffic. By geocoding an address (attaching latitude and longitude), a carrier can determine the correct Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) and all of the necessary routing information, and ensure that when the VoIP customer dials 911, the call will reach the correct PSAP.

In conclusion, location analysis allows data sources to be combined and linked based on their geographic commonality and/or proximity. If decisions about services, markets and technologies are being made without a complete analysis of all of the available location factors, then money is at best being left on the table, and at worst being sent down the drain.

Christopher Cherry is Strategic Industry Manager for Communications at MapInfo Corp.

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