What Is Value Added?

Value-added services are higher-level information requirements that operators provide to consumers than basic services. Therefore, it must provide better, more thoughtful and diverse services, and meet the individual requirements of different consumer groups. The value-added service itself determines that it must be a diversified and comprehensive bundled service, which is different from the voice service. The value-added service is a comprehensive service that integrates voice, pictures, text, etc., with rich content and wide coverage. , Is an integration of multiple businesses. Value-added services provide a series of business portfolios that bring new experiences to users.

The additional communication services developed by virtue of the resources of the public telecommunication network and other communication equipment, the realized value of which increases the economic or functional value of the original network, so it is called

There are many types, such as fax store and forward business,

The core characteristics of mobile value-added services are mobility, immediacy, and individuality.

Broad application prospects: With the development of society, the scope of people's activities is getting larger and larger and more uncertain. This mobility and uncertainty bring market and challenges to mobile communications, and also provide the necessary conditions for the development and expansion of mobile location services, bringing unlimited

1) E-mail, also called e-mail. The latest generation of e-mail boxes is the Message Processing System (MHS), which enables communication between disparate computers. An e-mail box provides users with access to, transmission of text, data, charts or other forms of written information.

The value-added telecommunications business around voice and messaging has developed rapidly since its birth, becoming the most beautiful scenery in the telecommunications industry. While improving the telecommunications service capabilities brings good social benefits, it has also become an important means of driving consumption in the entire telecommunications market. Has produced good economic benefits. However, with the vigorous development of mobile Internet and OTT services, value-added telecommunications services are currently facing unprecedented challenges.

First, user demand has changed dramatically. The Internet consumption boom led by the younger generation is constantly refreshing and defining the ultimate user experience and self-expression needs. The traditional telecom value-added service is a network-centric business model, and its competitiveness is obviously insufficient. New content and social entertainment-centric business models are emerging, and value is gradually shifting to content and terminals.

Second, the market competition situation has changed. Telecom value-added services have gradually changed from competition between operators to competition between operators and the Internet OTT industry. Taking WeChat as an example, the number of users and the average user's business usage are growing rapidly. OTT's cross-border operations, with its rich business forms and excellent user experience, are subverting the traditional telecommunications business operation model.

Finally, the revenue structure of operators is also changing. The revenue growth of voice and text messages slowed down and gradually turned downwards. The popularity of mobile Internet has led to explosive growth in traffic and rapid growth in data revenue. Operators are transforming into traffic management, digital services, and government and corporate affairs, forming new incremental revenue.

Under such a constantly changing market background, how to reposition the market for telecom value-added services around voice and messaging? With the development of new technologies such as cloud computing and big data, and the large-scale commercialization of 4G networks, what are the development trends of telecom value-added services and what new opportunities are they facing?

Extending from voice messaging to data content

The traditional telecom value-added services around voice and messaging will enter deep operation, and the business will be more segmented and more time-efficient. Different from the previous general-purpose value-added services, voice-message value-added services will enter the late stage of long-tail operations, and more industry-oriented and niche services will continue to be tapped and released, such as the introduction of scenario ringbacks and video ringbacks based on the color ringback service Advertising color ringtones, government public welfare ringtones, etc. IVR (Interactive Voice Response) extends to entertainment and broadcasting in addition to traditional telecommunication self-service.

More value-added services will emerge around the data and content fields, ushering in a golden period of development. For example, traffic red envelopes and corporate gift packages for traffic transactions; ToolBar, targeted acceleration, and video compression for traffic value-added optimization; targeted rule management and dynamic policy operations for data operation and maintenance; garbage monitoring and virus protection for data security; content areas Distributed storage and resource scheduling, CACHE caching, content optimization, etc .; in other areas, there will be more value-added services in advertising, payment, positioning and other directions. In the future, as value-added services continue to be subdivided and enriched, business chain combinations for different customer groups will also be formed.

Single service to multi-service, multi-network convergence evolution

From the perspective of terminal requirements, users are no longer satisfied with the use of multiple telecommunications services that are split from each other, but prefer a unified interface and unified entrance. In the future, the value-added services of telecommunications on the user side will also be integrated to a unified entrance to achieve a unified entrance and unified experience of multiple terminals, multiple networks and multiple services. In this way, operators can re-enter the entrance, and on this basis, form an ecosystem and expand their business scope.

From the perspective of business operation, multiple independent shaft-type equipment makes operators' investment and operation and maintenance costs high, making it difficult to obtain a competitive advantage. Therefore, the common part of multiple business platforms is extracted and the personalized part is retained, so that the multi-service platform can be integrated into one, which can reduce investment and operation and maintenance costs, and provide a better basis for the integration and interoperability of services.

The business capability engine is further separated from the application, forming a capability open layer

At present, most service platforms still include both the capability layer and the application layer, which not only restricts the rapid rollout of more personalized services and functions, but also does not help operators to fully apply the basic telecommunications capabilities. Only by decoupling the capability layer from the application layer, and implementing the API capability opening strategy at the capability open platform layer, can it liberate the productivity of the application layer, give play to the operator's basic capability advantages, form an ecosystem, and finally achieve a situation of a proliferation of value-added applications.

The evolution of product architecture to cloud and intelligence

With the continuous development of network bandwidth and IT technology, cloud computing technology will gradually gain widespread application in the telecommunications industry, forming multiple levels of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, which will have a profound impact on the current network architecture, product architecture, and even organizational structure. . The future telecommunication network will take the data center as the core, combined with the application of SDN / NFV technology, to make the network flat, centralized management, functional componentization, telecom value-added services and network elements to achieve software.

Virtualization enables software and hardware to be separated, and different network devices are integrated and deployed on standard computing, storage, and network devices to reduce network complexity; NFV cloudification enables automatic service deployment, automatic upgrade, and elastic scaling; through functional components The deployment of distributed distribution bureaus improves network availability and rapid orchestration of services; intelligent operation and maintenance and operations are realized through the application of big data; and finally, while reducing equipment investment and operation and maintenance costs, rapid service generation, deployment, and efficient operations are achieved.

More diversified business models

The business operation model of telecom value-added services is no longer a single B2C model. Combining multiple business models such as forward and backward, it will form a variety of business profit models such as B2C, B2B, B2B2C, and B2C2C. Telecom value-added services are no longer Operators are single-led, and more individuals will participate in the innovation of telecommunications value-added services. For equipment suppliers, they will also evolve from a single device sales to device sales, cooperative operations, and even from operating multiple mixed business models.

The world is eternally changing, especially in the ever-changing communications industry. In the face of new trends in market and technology development, telecom operators should also continue to explore and innovate with a more positive attitude in order to obtain a wider development space in the future. ^[5]