Zain, a leading telecom carrier, has explored innovative home broadband (HBB) operations with Huawei in the Middle East, and built the first benchmark site of Huawei's Premium Broadband Solution outside China.
With the rapid development of HBB digitalization, Zain proposed a fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) strategy to further develop in HBB field. By the implementation of the strategy, its HBB market share increased rapidly from 4% to 36% over the past four years. However, the rapid development also comes with a series of issues.
- The revenue growth does not match the subscription scale growth. Zain’s promotion of value-added services (VASs) encountered bottlenecks while it’s expanding from high value communities to low- and medium-value communities. In the past four years, the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) has decreased by 30% with the marketing success rate that’s less than 5%.
- Poor-QoE and inefficient O&M led to high complaint rate and churn rate. More than 90% of poor-QoE issues are identified only after users complain. Moreover, approximately 2 hours are needed for each home visit due to the segment by segment fault demarcation.
To address these issues, Zain and Huawei started an innovative practice of the Premium Broadband solution. In this solution, OLTs are equipped with AEC boards to collect application KPI data such as latency and jitter in real time. In this way, real user experience can be accurately and effectively measured. In addition, the intelligent big data analysis capability of Huawei’s iMaster NCE (manager, controller and analyzer system) implements digital operations of HBB services. During the pilot, Zain focused on potential subscriber marketing and poor-QoE rectification.
- In terms of potential subscriber marketing, the Premium Broadband solution provides information about user experience in using applications such as OTT video applications, types and quantity of STAs, and bottlenecks that cause poor user experience. During the pilot, based on the 5-dimensional potential subscriber model of value labels, Zain found that the proportions of potential package upgrade subscribers and potential networking subscribers were 26.8% and 4.6% respectively. Then, outbound calls and door-to-door sales are made based on the potential subscriber list. Through precise marketing, the marketing success rate of the package upgrade service is increased to 33%, which is six times higher than before. The marketing success rate of the networking service is increased to 20%, which is four times higher than before. It is estimated that the ARPU will increase by 21% after the solution is applied to the entire region.
- In terms of poor-QoE rectification, based on the poor-QoE detection algorithm and spatiotemporal correlation algorithm of Huawei’s Premium Broadband Solution, Zain identified 16.4% of users with poor-QoE application issues in the pilot area, among which 87.7% of the poor-QoE application issues occurred when users used online office applications, and 90% of the poor-QoE occurred on home network segment. The top 3 root causes of poor-QoE are weak coverage, strong interference, and 5G channel not used. During the pilot, the accuracy of poor-QoE identification is 87% and the accuracy of root cause identification is 88%. Based on the list of poor-QoE users and rectification policies generated by the solution, the visit duration was reduced from 2 hours to 0.5 hours. Configuration issues can be remotely optimized in one-click mode, reducing the number of home visits by 20%. After the rectification, the proportion of poor-QoE users in the pilot area decreases from 16.4% to 4.2%. In addition, weak Wi-Fi coverage issues can be resolved by adding APs during home visits, which then turns 53% of the complaints into opportunities of AP sales.
At the Ultra-Broadband Forum 2023 (UBBF 2023), Zain showcased its innovative premium broadband practice at its business case booth, and demonstrated brand-new ideas and core technologies for high-quality HBB development to carriers around the world.
Zain's CTO summarized that Huawei's premium broadband solution lays a solid foundation for Zain's premium HBB operations and will bring more values for various roles in HBB services. In addition, the brand-new "A-PRIME" value proposition of Huawei’s premium broadband solution provides effective ways to support for evolution to premium HBB operations, contributing to the future in-depth cooperation between Zain and Huawei.
