Once again GSM in Central & Eastern Europe was a fantastic success with 378 participants, plus this year’s exhibition comprised 30 stands demo-ing the hottest new services and applications. Main themes and key topics to emerge from speakers and sessions included:

Mobile subscriptions outstrip fixed, fixed infrastructure is inferior. Are we as operators exploiting this advantage? Extremely important to keep things simple for customers, today’s products are just too complex. There is an over emphasis on UMTS, we need to stay focused on basic services such as voice and sms. (Wolfgang Breuer, CEO HT Mobile)

Value added services (VAS) recurred as a theme to reverse decline in Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) time and time again. A key aid is successful co-branding, Mobilmak has run SMS based ‘games’ with Coca Cola on a monthly basis, with real results. (George Poulos, Chief Marketing Officer, Mobilmak) Similarly, Mobitel’s ‘Planet’ service is a real MMS success.

Mobile music proving to be a real driver. But it’s not about having a huge library, it’s about having a small focused and constantly refreshed selection of full tracks for download. It’s not all about partnerships with big labels either, local bands have a big impact, at a lower price. (Marketa Wernerova, Content Development Manager, Eurotel Praha). But on questioning from the audience, Eurotel have not looked at the potential to cross sell their full track to ringtones, for instance. A real possibility for additional revenues for operators?

There was great interest in Chris Wade’s (CEO, CPS, UK) presentation on location based services. The accuracy operators need is now available at the prices operators can afford. However, the real interest was in LBS as an application for the enterprise market, there has been strong take up of LBS as a cost-effective tool for fleet management.

Roaming, as GSM’s killer application was another hot topic. A co-presentation from Sebastien Violett, Europe Marketing Manager, Gemplus, Gearoid Carroll, Commercial Roaming Solutions Manager, O2 Ireland and Jonathan Benbow, Director of Product Marketing, EMEA, Solomio provided some interesting insights:

Voice is alive, operators must capitalize on their unique position as holder of the SIM. There must be a greater focus on interoperability. If your customer place calls abroad, it is your brand which suffers, regardless of whether it is the other network’s fault.

Further, there’s a real need to educate the customer. For instance, when your customer returns, are you sure they’ve gone back to your network? Roaming partnerships were also widely discussed. Is telling the customer to do a manual SIM roam ever going to work? Is it enough just to hope your partner has the coverage at the airport when the customer turns the phone back on? Let’s use our ownership of the SIM to set up partnerships that will work for us (HPMN), and guide our customers to our partners when they roam.

Some delegate feedback:

“The CEE conference gives a good home for networking with regional decision makers. A ‘must’ for operators as well as vendors!” AF Orga Systems

“It is a unique opportunity to get the general picture of the market and meet relevant people from this region” ,DS, VIPnet

“It is a great opportunity to meet people in the same branch and find out the reality other telecoms markets” CD, Mobifon

29 countries in participation:

Austria, Belgium, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Ireland, Latvia, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia/Montegro, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, UAE, UK and Ukraine. © «MForum.ru»