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more as a system integration solution than a transport solution. IoT deployments could have sales cycle of 2-3 years. Many decisions on IoT are taken during the product design stage, so the IoT specification definition is an integral part of a new product development. Potentially, it is a very long sales cycle, however once you are in, you are in for the lifespan of the product. Finally, the business model is not about bits and bytes, but rather a service-based model, as you don’t only provide a SIM card or the network to transport the data, but the end-toend solution. So IoT represents a complete evolution of how you address and serve your customers. THE CHALLENGES OF HYPER-CONNECTIVITY
What are the key success factors and challenges around enabling hyper-connectivity? If you look at what is happening in the consumer world, you see that voice and data services are increasingly part of bundles with unlimited voice, messaging and pre-defined amounts of data. This is creating a price pressure on the connectivity that supports it. However, the explosion of data usage means more revenue opportunities for the operators. The key to supporting this evolution is to achieve the lowest cost of production possible. To accomplish this, you need to benefit from ownership economics and this is the main reason why content providers are partnering with telcos to build networks.
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As a result, there is a lot of upside potential in connectivity, as long as you are happy to put capital in the ground and build networks. From there, you need to develop innovative pricing structures, which may mean moving from the per Mbit or per Gbit business model, to a managed service business model for example.
How do you ensure a high quality customer experience in a hyper-connectivity world? Customers have three needs: to have a great customer experience, at an affordable price, and to have this at every second of their lives. Now the challenge for operators, and increasingly for content providers, is to make that experience as seamless as possible. From a wholesale point of view, this means we need to provide the largest amount of capacity available, whether as Terabits or even dark fibre, we need to extend the ownership economics to our customer and we need to provide them, as they do for their own customers, with seamless connectivity backed by SLAs. When it comes to local access providers who are dealing with enterprise customers, what is also important to them is for our connectivity services to be automated, ‘burstable’ and self-serve. VODAFONE THE END-TO-END GIGABIT PROVIDER
What makes Vodafone so unique and successful in the connectivity world? What makes Vodafone unique is the fact that we put the customer at the heart