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Global smartphone sales are expected to reach about 1.35 billion units this year as consumers seek faster, more capable devices. That rising demand puts significant pressure on communications service providers (CSPs) to innovate and scale infrastructure. Following announcements at this year’s Mobile World Congress, it’s clear that the supporting networks and systems that handle surging mobile data traffic are increasingly critical.
As demand in the telecoms market grows, CSPs face a major growth opportunity—but revenues and profits across many European markets are showing signs of plateauing. Continued investment to expand and optimise 4G networks is weighing on carriers’ finances, and many operators are struggling to monetise the new usage driven by digital services.
Streaming and other over‑the‑top (OTT) services are often unprofitable for CSPs when offered without differentiation. To protect margins, operators are broadening bundles and tariff options, adding creative value‑added services designed to attract and retain customers and to generate incremental revenue.
While OTT partnerships and offerings help CSPs stay competitive, they also fragment the consumer proposition. Flexible, modular services give customers more choice, but can weaken loyalty because subscribers can easily switch components on or off. Creating stronger customer retention while maintaining profitable business models is therefore essential.
In this context, transactional and real‑time billing becomes critical. Such capabilities allow CSPs to monetise usage accurately and immediately, supporting new service models, dynamic pricing and personalised bundles. The key challenge is aligning the operator’s IT landscape with market needs—specifically, deploying modern, optimised business support systems (BSS) that enable fast integration and agile service delivery.
Historically, large OSS/BSS environments with multiple overlapping systems were developed to drive operational scale and revenue. Over time, those rigid legacy systems have become obstacles rather than enablers, complicating efforts to introduce new services and hampering time‑to‑market. Legacy platforms also impose rising maintenance costs and create complexity when trying to graft new BSS capabilities onto old infrastructure.
As the relationship between operators and mobile subscribers continues to evolve, modernising the IT backbone is essential for CSPs of all sizes. Implementing flexible, real‑time BSS and billing systems will be fundamental to integrating emerging technologies, meeting escalating consumer demand and, ultimately, restoring revenue and profit growth.