Background

Around the world, the competition for mobile operators intensifies every day. Their revenue shrinks due to increasing competition and the alternatives for free VoIP call on the data channel. In addition to the reduction in revenue, mobile operators are constantly required to invest a lot of money upgrading their infrastructure.  It is clear that eventually the reduction in revenue together with the increase in costs might bring disaster to the industry unless mobile operators will learn to increase and leverage their competitive edge.

What is the Competitive Edge for Mobile Operators?

Let’s go back to the basics. One of the biggest advantages that mobile operators can show is their ability to deliver high quality telephony. This is their core business and what their infrastructure was planned to deliver. Operators can make assure the calls will not suffer from any external interruptions. Their infrastructure is capable of providing robust calls regardless delays or load on the Internet. On top of this advantage, Mobile operators need to emphasize their audio quality and make sure it is always ahead of any other free alternative in the market. In this respect, there are several issues that should be addressed. Some of them (like moving from narrowband to wideband) might require a change in the infrastructure so we will not discuss them. Others are simpler to add to the existing infrastructure.

Quality Audio – Ambient Noise

As elaborated in our previous post, one of the biggest quality problems that mobile phones create is the ambient noise. Since mobile operators have full control over the streaming audio, they have simple ways for improving the quality of the audio and reducing the ambient noise.

Quality Audio –Personalization

Mobile operators should utilize the fact that mobile phones are personal devices. This information can be used to improve audio quality even further. For example, when a business person makes a business call using his personal mobile phone, only his voice should be transferred to the other side and all other voices, like kids in the back of the car, should be suppressed as their voice is different from the voice of the phone owner.