This article is the second in a series highlighting four groups of promising telco data monetization use cases identified in a recent global poll conducted by Intersec. The first article revealed the results of the poll and looked at the potential for Communications Service Providers (CSPs) to leverage the data they collect about their customers to increase engagement, sell additional services, and reduce churn. Here, we look at the growing opportunity for telcos to monetize anonymized data externally by sharing it with enterprise customers and partners.
Author: Sébastien Synold, Product Manager, Intersec
In the first article in this series, we explained how mobile operators can combine the micro-segmentation and geolocation capabilities of a big data analytics platform to label subscribers with tags based on behavior, location, and other criteria to sell additional services to existing customers. CSPs can also monetize these insights externally – indeed, they must do so to offset the high cost of deploying 5G and fiber and reclaim their leadership position in the communications services value chain.
Telcos’ unique coverage of subscribers and territory means they can accurately locate any device at any time on their networks. This allows them to provide anonymized and reliable data to third parties – data that isn’t limited only to telecoms services, but can include information about payment processing, physical sensors, IoT logs and alerts…
Operators can create comprehensive, highly detailed, and anonymized customer profiles. They can also provide detailed analysis of population mobility. These insights can be used for targeted marketing, to enhance public safety, or to develop strategies to better serve citizens or customers depending on how they move within a designated area.
Filling the third-party cookie void
CSPs have a unique opportunity now to monetize behavior and location data because third-party cookies are being phased out in 2024. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and privacy laws in other countries prohibit companies from collecting a user’s data without their consent. As a result, Apple has already eliminated third-party cookies, and Google announced in December that it has started phasing them out as well, with a pledge to eliminate them completely by the end of this year.
This opens the door for telcos to provide anonymized data-as-a-service (DaaS) to companies and government organizations that want to conduct targeted advertising, determine site selection, guide development strategies, or build smart cities. Telco metadata is richer than the data provided via cookies because it includes mobility data for an entire population, and this data can be collected continuously. Cookies provide only a few data points per day – and they provide no data if the user opts not to open their browser that day.
“Telcos are one of the best options for data partnerships,” says Pedro Uria Recio, Chief Analytics & AI Officer at True Digital, a multinational technology company headquartered in Thailand. “Thanks to telcos’ vast amount of data and high-engagement channels, they can roll out cookie-free and privacy-friendly data-driven solutions for advertising, credit risk, and intelligence.”
As explained in the first article in this series, True Digital uses micro-segmentation to label its subscribers with more than 400 tags that are demographic, geographic, behavioral, and interest-based, and then uses real-time triggers to decide the best moment to interact with customers and deliver new offers. True Digital then anonymizes this data and offers it to other companies that want to advertise on high-engagement channels such as SMS, video streaming and e-wallet apps. The company also leverages geolocation to conduct footfall and mobility analyses to help businesses make better decisions about where to open new shops or branches.
Watch True Digital’s Pedro Uria Recio discuss the value of telco data:
Leveraging geoinsights
CSPs can also use geostatistics to monetize data externally. Full visibility of the population’s movements at country scale is valuable to government organizations and companies that provide healthcare, transport, tourism, and energy.
By leveraging a big data platform that collects, filters, analyzes, and presents mobility insights derived from network data, CSPs can access heat maps and real-time analysis based on massive amounts of data and in full compliance with regulatory requirements to protect subscribers’ personal data.
True Digital implemented an important use case demonstrating these capabilities during the Covid-19 pandemic. Early on during the global crisis, hospitals in Thailand became overburdened by epidemic clusters that made controlling the spread of disease challenging. True Digital was able to use anonymized location data and density maps to help public health authorities quickly visualize people’s movement in real time from a local to national scale.
The telco tracked 30 million devices, collecting 500,000 events per second at two-minute intervals. A rating scale was set to identify the populations most at risk of contracting Covid, and analytics insights were used to predict the spread of disease. This helped public health authorities decide where to send medical staff and how to streamline medical operations.
"We were able to provide the Asia-Pacific authorities with instantaneous, precise location data that saved lives and prevented additional evolution of the pandemic,” says Uria Recio.
Geostatistics help build the Grand Paris Express
In France, a telecoms operator serving more than 20 million mobile subscribers, is helping government organizations and companies in the tourism and transportation industries to perform statistical studies based on the movement of people on a national scale. The resulting data, which is anonymized to meet GDPR privacy rules, helps organizations make strategic decisions through a better understanding of their territories. As an example, they helped public transportation authorities in Île-de-France, the region of the country that includes Paris, determine where to place stations on the ambitious Grand Paris Express project. The project, which is expected to be completed in 2030, will introduce four new lines and extend two existing lines. The Île-de-France railway system serves 8.5 million daily travelers today and is expected to serve 12 million when the Grand Paris Express project is complete.
The French CSP collected mobility data in the region 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to identify the number and types of visitors to the area – determining whether they were workers or tourists, for example. They also analyzed routes taken and the length of travelers’ itineraries.
Overall, the CSP analyzed more than 1 billion network events, with visitors’ privacy protected using cryptographic aliasing and unreversed anonymization. The results helped rail authorities determine where to locate some of the 68 new stations that are being constructed. When the project is finished, 90% of inhabitants of the region will live less than 2 kilometers away from a rail station.
In the next article in this series, we’ll look ahead to the opportunities for CSPs to combine 5G connectivity with IoT sensors and geolocation to help companies in many verticals improve manufacturing, logistics, quality control, and more.
