Indian telecom giants Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Reliance Jio Infocomm are gearing towards commercial blockchain deployment in later part of this year. They have been considering this move in order to increase their source of revenues.
In a previous post I’ve mentioned how the Indian banking industry was gearing towards blockchain deployment. Now telcos are considering amid growing operational costs, and reduced margins. Blockchain technology could potentially create new revenue streams for them.
It's true that Reliance Jio setup an engineering team last year to work towards building blockchain technology for new use cases and applications.
According to the latest report from ET:
Vodafone India is already at the proof of concept (PoC) stage with blockchain technology. Airtel is currently involved in initial trials while Jio is using a startup accelerator JioGenNext to bring blockchain-related startups on board for development. There are 15-16 Proof of Concepts going on with various companies.
Telcos can use blockchain in areas including data and content monetisation and mobile number portability. Currently, the global market for blockchain is about $500 million and it is expected to grow beyond $7 billion in the next three to four years, IBM estimates.
Indian telcos have been under pressure to innovate on a regular basis. The competition today is massive in this domain amongst these top telcos. This is due to the massive disruption of the market by new entrants such as Reliance Jio. Blockchain tech offers greater flexibility in terms of data storage, as well as content monetisation.
Infact it could potentially lead to monetisation of data. I'm unclear of how they plan on doing this as there's no official confirmation from these telcos yet but companies such as IBM is working closely with telcos such as Airtel to bring blockchain tech into mainstream use. Atleast for telecom industry applications.
Blockchain can help Indian telcos in mobile number portability. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, in its recent consultation paper on reviewing the mobile number portability process, suggested blockchain solutions as one of the options that can benefit telecom management systems.
Prepaid users often change their numbers in India as telcos keep changing their plans. People also love porting their numbers regularly. Blockchain can aid in terms of speed and transparency in these cases and make a massive difference in rending service on schedule.
Blockchain tech has various use cases. IBM certainly thinks so:
Communication service providers can provide a variety of digital customer services built on blockchain, bringing them new revenue streams. Areas in which they should consider deployment of blockchains include digital asset transactions (micropayments for music, mobile games and the like), mobile money (subscriber-to-subscriber money transfers, international remittance) and identity-as-a-service.
Companies such as IBM has been investing heavily in building blockchain technology. Even Bosch is working on a blockchain for internal use for their own supply-chain use-cases. IBM considers blockchain to be the perfect tool for supply-chain management as well as communication service providers.
Last year when I gave a presentation at Bosch India HQ on blockchain technology. During my interaction with their VP for Startup and Blockchain as well as VC, they spoke of the possibilities of blockchain being adopted in sectors such as telecom, supply-chain management, retail as well as sales sectors. Today, telcos in India are working towards implementing such technology and some Indian banks are already working on their own tech.
It's incredible how the fast blockchain tech is gathering interest in India but the government isn't happy with the cryptocurrency aspect of it.
Telecom Industry has several use cases for Blockchain technology as reported on Blockchain-Council
- Internal processes
- Roaming
- Smart connection
- Smart transactions
- Mobile money
- Identity management
Telecom industry today has the most complex operations framework, involving many partners, vendors, customers, distributors, network providers, VAS providers. There are a lot of trust issues and transparency challenges due to the involvement of multiple entities. Also, there are no clear mechanism to track end-to-end activities of every entity.
If you are interested to learn more here's a few slides on the subject matter: https://www.slideshare.net/BlockchainCouncil
Blockchain technology can easily help this industry in reducing fraudulent practices while improving efficiency and reducing operational costs. It's only a matter of time when other industry sectors begin using this modern technology.
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