Letting It Flow with RAN Data Monetization

Communications service providers (CSPs) are always searching for promising new revenue opportunities from their subscriber base. RAN data offers a largely untapped wealth of subscriber data that can be monetized. By accessing and analyzing geolocation and other consumer usage data points, CSPs can provide B2B customers with new use cases for building their businesses. Of critical importance, this data can be fully anonymized to protect personal information and ensure European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance. 
Leveraging this rich data is key to monetization efforts. Of course, the data needs to be highly accurate, reliable, and available in near real time. Any loss of data can be consequential, negatively affecting analytic results and making it more difficult to achieve B2B business objectives. 
This blog briefly examines some of the use cases that can benefit from RAN data analytics.

Tapping into Insights Around Tourism

CSPs have an opportunity to provide invaluable insights into tourist activities to local and regional governments, retailers, associations, and other interested parties. These insights might include the total number of tourists, activities these visitors are engaging in, where they are going within the region, and what points of interest they are focusing on. This data can identify differences in tourist patterns as related to the seasons, months of the year, and even time of day.

Armed with analytics powered by these location or event insights, along with gender, age, and additional social demographic data, retailers are better able to target marketing campaigns to reach precisely the right customers. The same data can provide insights into tourist preferences, allowing event organizers and tourist bureaus to promote points of interest more effectively.

Transportation: Know Your Riders

For transportation authorities, analysis of vital RAN data from CSPs holds tremendous potential for infrastructure as well as service optimization. Knowing where riders are going, where they come from, and what type of ticket was used can be extremely helpful in planning. Having visibility into mobility behavior, including the crucial first and last mile, enables better tender planning, marketing, network evaluation, infrastructure adaptation, station optimization, and much more. Such insights are helpful in understanding current usage, which can lead to more effective planning for the future.

An additional benefit of gaining critical passenger travel insights is the ability to achieve clock optimization. By understanding which passenger service is most crowded when authorities can implement dynamic pricing to encourage ridership at less traveled times of the day.

Security Insights for Public Gatherings

In the case of large public gatherings, such as fans attending a football game at a stadium, authorities are always on the lookout for security concerns.  By analyzing RAN geolocation data, CSPs can deliver insights into where fans come from, where they are going, and where groups congregate. This real-time data can be extremely useful in mapping fan movements and any potential hot spots that could lead to a clash of fan groups, allowing security and police personnel to take proactive steps to avert a problem. The same sort of data insights can also be useful when monitoring demonstrations and determining how best to distribute security resources.

Advertising and Digital Out-of-Home Marketing

Advertising and digital out-of-home marketing provide another primary use case for RAN data monetization. Billboard, mega-billboard, overhead-display, and rooftop advertising operators, for example, can benefit from knowing how many visitors pass the location of the advertising per day and hour. When people stop, presumably to read the ad, operators can learn where these folks come from. It can also be useful to know where people who don’t stop come from. Armed with this knowledge, operators can more effectively determine whether the ad is reaching the right audience with the right frequency.

The NETSCOUT Advantage

NETSCOUT’s TrueCall software solution provides real-time, 24/7/365 analysis of data originating in the RAN. This data is enriched using TrueCall’s advanced geolocation algorithm and is correlated with subscriber and device data. It enables complete insight into a wide variety of performance views to provide value across an operator’s organization and generates a wealth of data CSPs can use to cash in on an array of emerging B2B business opportunities.

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