How to maintain fast growth while keeping existing customers happy

Is your sales team working round the clock to get new customers only to find out others are leaving you?

How can you know how many more customers your Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) network can handle in a specific geographical area while still guaranteeing a good speed for everyone?

To keep your customers happy and to minimize churn, your mobile network needs to be high performing.

While churn is affected by a variety of customer satisfaction factors, network performance is critical, even more so when it comes to Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) service providers. Poor coverage, low data speeds, stalling and low-quality video streaming, all impact on customer satisfaction and ultimately churn. For enterprise services the impact can be even greater as non-performing cloud-based business applications may interfere with that enterprise business.

As a service provider, operating a network consumes scarce and expensive resources. The demand on those resources increases when the network under-performs or, worse, can result in a major incident. Understanding the factors driving network performance and those likely to result in an incident is critical to service management. Additionally, business realities mean that operators are limited in how much they can invest in their network. That’s why operators need to maximize the value of their network investments and target the right technologies, locations, applications, and users to maximize customer experience and revenue.

Wireless networks were not conceived to deliver FWA services; however, some operators have tried to explore the FWA business case by typically using LTE TDD in combination with advanced antenna systems. The main area of focus for FWA services is rural areas where infrastructure costs prevent fixed providers from rolling out services. The expectation is that demand for FWA services will grow with the surge of 5G and newly available spectrum.

Accurately estimating the number of sell-able customers in their network and managing the performance of existing sites from a capacity and from a delivered customer experience perspective is of the utmost importance.

From our experience and listening to our customers, we quickly understood that traditional vendors were using capacity models that did not consider key factors such as live network performance and individual customer metrics, and were not designed to work on a per-sector and cell basis. Another issue with existing solutions is the lack of adaptability to each FWA provider. For vendors, the FWA return is much smaller than typical mobile, it’s very likely that vendors have not given much thought to how a generic capacity model may not be of use to FWA operators, with different business models and customer profiles. In most cases these models were designed for mobile networks and just being applied to FWA networks without proper adjustments.

To address this problem, Aspire has designed a capacity model specifically for FWA. With this innovative model, our customers can accurately plan and forecast sales, improve customer experience and fully maximize the usage of network assets, therefore improving their Return on Investment (RoI).

The model provides per-cell spare capacity figures (in number of sellable customers) and diagnostics using live network data and considering factors such as the usage profile of each connected subscriber, category of customer equipment, and radio quality experienced by customers in the cell. It also provides actionable insights and recommendations to operators in terms of managing capacity in the best possible way.

With Covid-19 pandemic and people working from home, the model is now stress tested and as traffic and user profiles change, operators can quickly realize where and when capacity may run short and how their most valuable customers are experiencing their services.

If you would like to know more, I am happy to answer any of your questions, just drop me an email at pedro.pimentel@aspiretechnology.com