Recognising the need for integrated and customised services to aid carriers' expansion of the latest services to new countries and regions, China Mobile International (CMI) has introduced a new model called iConnect ONE, which is aimed at empowering players as digitalisation goes global.
The era of rapid digitalisation in which we currently live is creating a whole new world of opportunities for carriers and other businesses. As technologies like 5G and IoT come to the fore to create more widely connected societies, those possibilities are assuming an increasingly international dimension.
Going global can maximise potential in areas like connected vehicles and shipping, IoT-based medical devices, smart cities and financial services – all of which are hugely exciting and enticing for the industry, as well as much wider society.
As a result, carriers and businesses all over the world have realised the enormous potential that digital transformation provides to expand their reach. This includes sizeable opportunities for players in emerging markets as digitalisation helps them start to catch up with other regions.
But these changes also bring some major challenges as the provision of cross-region connectivity and global deployment becomes more crucial for scaling up, particularly for those that don’t have the existing international reach to quickly expand at a time when things are moving fast.
Carriers operating in individual countries that want to offer a wider variety of services may want to team up with other global service providers to better equip and expand their service portfolio and maximise their reach, capturing the opportunities for both international and local growth. That would give them the chance to make the most of the huge potential offered by the digital transformation.
Holistic services
Partnership with a global carrier offers a route to achieving this growth much faster.
As a carrier with significant scale across the world, this is something that China Mobile International (CMI) has fully recognised and where it wants to step in. In that way, the company believes it can enable swifter expansion for the market’s players, empowering each other to seize global opportunities at this key time of major change in the industry, while saving on costs and monetising their services.
With that in mind, CMI has introduced iConnect ONE to drive the development of global data connectivity services. This takes the “one-stop-shop” ethos of its existing iConnect brand launched for its carrier services in 2018, focusing on service integration and customisation to meet current market demands.
As a result of the industry changes CMI is seeing in the market, the company believes it’s a good opportunity to provide such holistic services targeted at addressing diversified customer needs.
Omni network enablement
These services are housed under the four key categories of roaming services, connectivity services, 5G and IoT services, and empowerment services.
Taking each in turn, roaming services facilitate customer rollouts of interconnect and roaming services to help manage data consumption, and roaming clearing services.
iConnect ONE’s connectivity services comprise much-in-demand low-latency connections and flexible bandwidth options, allowing customers to fit what they need to their individual needs.
The 5G and IoT part of the offering provides capabilities for some of the services presenting the most exciting opportunities of today, enabling a faster, smoother rollout of services using those technologies. These include technical support, consultancy services and platform-as-a-service to help carriers build up their local network.
They can also harness services such as CMI’s iConnect 5G Power Cabinet, an integrated system for base stations designed to meet energy supply challenges even in severe environments. And CMI’s 5G private-network services and applications can further enable carrier partners to better serve their end users and meet different market needs across industries.
Finally, empowerment services are targeted at maximising carriers’ chance to swiftly harness emerging business opportunities and better monetise resources, including messaging, VoIP and content platforms. As part of this, CMI offers value-added services that enable providers to meet complex and fast-changing needs in the digital era, while helping them to future-proof their existing services and provide them with the scope for real innovation.
Customers can, meanwhile, easily access iConnect services through a dedicated portal that allows them to get information like traffic reports, invoices and different kinds of business insights and statistics. This iConnect Customer Portal is aimed at offering an agile and transparent consulting platform that helps users gather business data and manage their daily operations.
Enabling carriers to outsource operations, iConnect ONE also helps operators to slash costs, complement and differentiate their offerings with value-added services and gain access to professional consultancy services that can aid in finding effective ways forward for their business.
Leveraging networks
CMI’s extensive global reach underpins the operator’s ability to rapidly provide the multitude of capabilities enabled by iConnect ONE, allowing customers to maximise value from their services.
Since being established at the end of 2010, CMI also has more than 230 points of presence across all the world’s regions, plus investments in 15 submarine cables and 23 terrestrial cables, with international transmission bandwidth of over 123Tbps. On top of that, it has five self-owned data centres in key locations – Hong Kong, Singapore, London and Frankfurt.
CMI’s parent, China Mobile, is, meanwhile, the world’s largest operator by mobile user base, numbering almost a billion subscribers in a very-fast-growing part of the globe. The company has seen take-up of 5G accelerate at quite a pace too, with the operator counting 614 million subscribers to the technology in China by the end of 2022 after gaining more than a third of those users last year alone. Moreover, it has signed more than 18,000 agreements for commercial 5G projects across multiple sectors.
Leveraging CMI’s extensive global networks and experience, iConnect ONE is aimed at empowering carriers to seize global business opportunities, expand their networks with ease and access a whole range of services they need through a single connection site.
While healthy competition remains key to development of the global wholesale market today, ever-growing demand for digitalisation in all corners of the world means that collaboration and partnerships are important to create opportunities for all.
In the carrier world, where everyone’s trying to adopt a digital ecosystem, CMI’s ability will further provide a model that combines a full range of services with a wide international reach.
