Telecom Cloud

Churn has a simple definition for a wireless operator – it is the number of net deactivations (i.e. gross adds minus net adds) divided by the average number of the subscriptions during the year. Mobile telecommunication market has changed from a rapidly growing market, into a state of saturation and fierce competition. The focus of telecommunication companies has therefore shifted from building a large customer base into keeping customers ‘in house’. Customers who switch to a competitor are so called churned customers. Churn prevention, through churn prediction, is one way to keep customers ‘in house’. In contrast to post-paid customers, prepaid customers are not bound by a contract. The central problem concerning prepaid customers is that the actual churn date in most cases is difficult to assess. This is a direct consequence of the difficulty in providing an unequivocal definition of churning and a lack of understanding in churn behavior. In the telecom service industry, churn can be of several types -

• Involuntary churn: This occurs when subscribers fail to pay for service and as a result the provider terminates service. Termination of service due to theft or fraudulent usage is also classified as involuntary churn.
• Unavoidable churn: This occurs when customers die, move or are otherwise permanently removed from the market place.
• Voluntary churn: Service termination on the part of the customer when leaving one operator and possibly for another because of better value

In reality, it is very unlikely that MNOs could differentiate unavoidable and voluntary churn and predict them separately.

Nokia Siemens Customer Acquisition & Churn Study

 Churn can be shown as follows: 

Monthly Churn = (C0 + A1 – C1) / C0

Where:

C0 = Number of customers at the start of the month

C1 = Number of customers at the end of the month

A1 = Gross new customers duringh the month

 As an example, suppose a carrier has 100 customers at the start of the month, acquires 20 new customers during the month, and has 110 customers at the end of the month. It must have lost 10 customers during the month, 10 percent of the customers it had at the start of the month.

According to the formula:

Monthly Churn = (100 + 20 – 110) / 100 = 10%  Read more…

The long standing objective of any wireless network operator has always been Optimization of network performance, maximizing efficiency and thereby providing the highest customer satisfaction.

Today’s wireless networks have come a long way from providing just voice services to customers, to delivering high speed content rich data applications to their wireless handsets in addition to the traditional voice. With these changes, has come a wide variety of tools and applications which aid in letting the network operators achieve their objectives.

Drive testing has always been an integral part of Wireless Network optimization and it continues to be so even after the emergence of newer and faster Voice and Data Technologies.

But is Drive Testing absolutely necessary or can it be replaced completely with the tools that today’s operators have at their disposal?

Let’s look at some key areas why we would need Drive Testing today:

• Green Field Operation/Benchmarking: For any operator deploying a brand-new wireless network, there is currently no other way than to deploy the network and drive test it to gauge performance. Also, drive testing is critical for benchmark performance analysis of multiple wireless network providers.
• Some RF Engineers think that the key to network optimization is to actually understand the subscriber’s experience and consider drive testing to be the only way to simulate actual subscriber experience.

While both above mentioned aspects sound true, there are some highly developed tools available today that might be able to provide data which can significantly reduce drive testing and cut costs for network operators. Read more…