Wireless providers will need to adjust their strategies to accelerate innovation, cement customer relationships and improve operational efficiency to maintain revenue and profit growth.

1. • Cognizant 20-20 Insights
Wireless at a Crossroads
(First installment in a multipart series)
As record profits and low churn rates show signs of abating, wireless
providers will need to adjust their strategies to accelerate innovation,
cement customer relationships and improve operational efficiency to
maintain revenue and profit growth.
Executive Summary
As they say, all good things must come to an
end. After years of record profits and soaring
subscriber numbers, the U.S. wireless market is
now becoming saturated, with over 90% of adults
in the U.S. owning a cell phone, according to
Pew Research Center.1 The heady growth cannot
continue without another swell of innovation
spurring new sales, which does not appear immediately forthcoming. Pundits posit that machineto-machine wireless (M2M) will be “the next big
thing,” shifting the question to how to profit from
the “Internet of things.” With a slowdown in the
wave of game-changing technology, consumers
are now value-conscious and much more inclined
to use pre-paid service than they used to be.
The party is ending quickly. For much of its
history, the U.S. wireless market has seen wave
after wave of innovative “must-have” products
(the feature phone, the smartphone and tablets).
Revenue and subscriptions grew at a healthy clip.
Now, the picture is emerging of a commoditizing
market in which purchasing is driven increasingly by the need for replacements and upgrades.
The new reality: Obtaining new subscribers now
means taking them from competing providers.
cognizant 20-20 insights | november 2013
In this environment, wireless providers must move
quickly to revitalize their customer experience
strategies, optimize their infrastructure and
develop partnerships to revolutionize their
product lines. One potential strategy is to take a
lesson from leaders such as Amazon, Facebook
and Google and leverage the data generated by
subscribers and all digital consumers in every
aspect of their lives — what we call “Code Halos.”™
(For more on Code Halos, read our white paper,
“Code Rules: A Playbook for Managing at the
Crossroads.”) In other words, they must perform
more like tech companies than telecos. As such,
carriers no longer have the luxury of time — the
time to adjust is now.
A Changing Landscape
The seemingly unshakable U.S. wireless communications market now finds itself at a crossroads.
The market is quickly maturing, and the growing
subscriber numbers, record profits and low churn
rates will not continue forever.
Competitive forces are also growing from
outside the traditional wireless sector. Internet
technology companies are beginning to leverage
their growing mobile experience, along with their

2. Market Maturation
Wireless providers have seen a fall-off in quarterly subscriber net additions.
7M
6M
5M
4M
3M
2M
1M
‘13
‘13
Q2
Q1
‘12
‘12
Q4
Q3
‘12
‘11
‘11
‘12
Q2
Q1
Q4
‘11
Q3
‘11
Q2
Q1
‘10
‘10
‘10
‘10
Q4
Q3
Q2
‘0
9
Q1
‘0
9
Q4
‘0
9
Q3
Q2
Q1
‘0
9
0
Source: FCC (Q1 2009-Q4 2011 data) and Chetan Sharma Consulting (Q1 2012-Q2 2013).
Figure 1
considerable ambition and resources, to enter
the wireless marketplace. Two cases in point are
Google and Facebook, which are targeting multiple
elements of the wireless market, primarily to
drive ad revenues. This is happening at the same
time that wireless subscriber growth is declining
(see Figure 1) and customers are becoming more
price-sensitive.
The U.S. mobile market has entered a time of
change that will affect the nature of competition in this space, as well as how companies
win and the basis for growth going forward. As
a result, providers are faced with the need to
simultaneously initiate innovations in customer
experience and product/service offerings while
also improving efficiencies in their network and
business operations.
A quick examination of recent history confirms
the urgency. The industry has experienced
previous periods where once dominant carriers
were unable to adjust and quickly fell behind,
disappeared or were absorbed by others. In the
2000s, several carriers, including Global Crossing,
WorldCom, Nextel and the original AT&T Corp.,
suffered such fates. In the ‘90s, fallen carriers
included MCI, PacBell and NYNEX. The reasons
were different, but the results were the same.
And similar to the present, the fallout at those
crossroads followed periods of strong business
performance and market expansion.
cognizant 20-20 insights
Now, communications and tech giants such as
Amazon, Google and Facebook are generating
dramatically higher market capitalization than the
wireless carriers that provide their essential infrastructure (see Figure 2, next page). This is due in
part to their ability to track, understand and profit
from their customers’ preferences and requirements as expressed via their digital footprints,
or Code Halos. If wireless carriers could similarly
create new product offerings based on Code Halo
insights, they would be even better positioned to
profit due to their powerful ecosystems, which
consist of networks, billing and customer care
infrastructures; marketing and sales forces; and
retail channels.
The Good News Now
The U.S. wireless communications market has
shown impressive strength compared with other
developed markets, especially since the release of
the Apple iPhone in 2007, which helped usher in
the smartphone era. That performance was interrupted by a dip during the 2008-2009 recession,
but record growth returned in 2010. Consider the
following indicators of robust market health:
• Sales growth. Strong sales are attributable to
the explosion in mobile data usage driven by
the adoption of smartphones, tablets and other
devices, as well as the accompanying new price
plans. According to GSMA Wireless Intelligence,
while European wireless revenues are contract-
2

3. Wireless Providers Not Reaping the Rewards
Tech and communication giants lead wireless providers in market capitalization.
$500B
$400B
$300B
$200B
$100B
ile
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iz
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AT
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og
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$0
Note: Valuations as of Sept. 24, 2013.
Source: Company filings, NYSE, Capital IQ.
Figure 2
ing, U.S. revenues continue to expand, such
that monthly average revenue per unit (ARPU)
for U.S. carriers is now 80% higher than it is
in Europe.2
• Robust M&A activity. The acquisitions of Leap
Wireless, Metro PCS and Clearwire have been
announced or been completed. Even industry
giants like Sprint and Verizon Wireless (the
portion owned by Vodafone) have found buyers
willing to spend billions on their acquisitions.
• Healthy
profits. While handset subsidies
continue to be a drag on profit for U.S. carriers,
individual profit records are also being set. For
example, in the first quarter of 2013, Verizon
reported the highest segment EBITDA margin
(50.4%) on service revenues in the company’s
history.3
• Capital
investments in 4G and long-term
evolution (LTE) network upgrades. U.S.
carriers are projected to spend $37.7 billion
on the LTE rollout between 2012 and 2017,
according to market strategy consultancy iGR.5
This aggressive build-out should translate to
roughly one in five wireless connections in the
U.S. being LTE by the end of 2013, according
to GSMA Wireless Intelligence. That compares
with roughly one in 50 in Europe for the same
period.6
• Low churn. U.S. customer defection rates are
trending in historically low ranges of less than
1% to about 2% per month.4 The major U.S.
wireless players showed declining or steady
churn rates in the last few years. And adjusting
for the shutdown of Nextel, industry churn has
been low overall.
• Pricing
power. Carriers have been able to
increase prices in several ways, such as retiring
unlimited data plans, which allowed them to
charge for data usage, driving a windfall that
helped justify and fund their investments in
the 4G network. Case in point is T-Mobile’s
disruptive move earlier this year to eliminate
contract plans and subsidies for phones. Under
these new plans, consumers pay full price for
the smartphone through an upfront fee and
monthly payment. The net result: These new
plans took hold without carriers losing subscribers.
cognizant 20-20 insights
The Inflection Point
Despite the recent good news, change is afoot
in the U.S. market, even in areas that until just
recently exhibited positive signs. Consider the
following:
• Flattening subscriber growth (particularly for
post-paid subscriptions). While wireless revenue
continues to grow, the pace of subscriber
expansion has dramatically slowed, as the U.S.
market nears saturation. In the second quarter
of 2013, U.S. carriers added only 139,000 net
new mobile connections, according to Chetan
Sharma Consulting.7 The impact of the Nextel
3

4. shutdown was clearly a factor, yet even in the
first quarter, all subscribers increased less than
0.5%. According to the CTIA Wireless Association, the 327.4 million U.S. wireless subscriptions at the end of December
Google, Facebook and 2012 corresponded to market
102.2%.8
Apple are working penetration ofof tablets And
while growth
and
to become both the other new devices may be a
“front door” to the positive force for subscripgrowth, factors such
mobile experience and tionconsolidation of devices,
as
the conduit for sales b r i n g - y o u r - o w n - d e v i c e
to and information (BYOD) programs and family
about mobile device share plans are likely to
constrain subscriber growth
and network users to even further.
drive ad sales. •
Increased focus on
price/value.
Value-based
pre-paid wireless is now the fastest growing
U.S. market segment, potentially reducing
both ARPU and the consistency of revenue.
(Watch for a future piece in this series for a
more in-depth discussion of this trend and
its implications for wireless providers.) Even
Verizon isn’t immune to the more challenging
environment. Its post-paid wireless-subscriber
additions were down 40% year over year in the
third quarter of 2013.9
Additional examples of how this trend is playing
out include:
>> In the first quarter of 2013, there were more
net-new pre-paid mobile subscribers than
traditional post-paid subscribers for the first
time ever, according to Capital IQ.10
>> TracFone
was the fastest growing mobile
provider, based on the number of subscribers in the first quarter of 2013.11 The company
had more net-new subscribers than all the
post-paid carriers combined, according to
Capital IQ.
>> AT&T has invested in both the creation of its
own Aio pre-paid wireless subsidiary and the
purchase of pre-paid carrier Leap Wireless.
>> T-Mobile
acquired pre-paid provider Metro
PCS.
• Emerging wireless price competition, even in
the post-paid segment. After already creating
a market stir with its $100-per-month unlimited
voice and data plan, Sprint has further reduced
the price of that plan to $80 per month.
T-Mobile has also introduced an unlimited plan
(along with other pricing changes), and in the
cognizant 20-20 insights
second quarter of 2013, it led all U.S. carriers in
growth of post-paid subscribers.12
• Outside
pressures. As mentioned above,
Google, Facebook and Apple are working to
become both the “front door” to the mobile
experience and the conduit for sales to
and information about mobile device and
network users. Cable operators are positioning their Wi-Fi networks as alternatives to
mobile broadband, as are mobile broadband
companies like Clearwire.
The Crossroads
The changes detailed above point to a market
moving in the direction of a more mature, lower
growth state, characterized by elements found in
commodity marketplaces. This shift means the
U.S. market will become increasingly like more
competitive markets in terms of growth and other
attributes, including:
• More aggressive and direct price competition.
• A need to grow the subscriber base by taking
share and customers from other providers vs.
attracting new users.
• Aggressive
cost-reduction options, such as
infrastructure sharing and outsourcing.
• Increased focus on the regulatory environment.
We believe carriers can effectively respond to
these market changes by focusing on three areas
that can impact performance, even amid slow
growth and more intense competition: retaining
and growing customers, developing innovative
services and lowering costs in order to offer lower
prices.
Customer Experience
Providing a strong customer experience is the key
to retaining existing customers and proactively
winning customers from other carriers. Consumers
today measure their experience with their wireless
provider (and other brands) not against that of
other carriers, but against standards established
by customer experience leaders such as Amazon
and Apple. Several carriers are already investing
in customer experience, with a renewed focus on
customer metrics like NPS (net promoter score);
however, as a group, carriers lag in providing a
high-quality, personalized experience consistently
across channels. Most also have not yet succeeded
in translating directives to improve NPS or other
metrics into actions on which teams can execute
across the organization.
4

5. The work of defining an engaging customer
experience can be long and all-encompassing, but
there are a few key activities at the core. First on
the agenda: segmenting customers using insights
about actual customer behavior and customizing service to the needs and values of those
segments rather than providing the same service
for all. At the brand level, carriers also need to
differentiate on meaningful attributes that distinguish them and counter the inability of many
wireless customers to identify significant differences among carriers.
Aligning the company around a particular value
set is a fundamental way of standing out in a
share-driven market, where customers need a
compelling reason to switch providers. The values
or attributes that the provider chooses for differentiation need to be reflected in every aspect
of the brand, including strategy, operations
and customer experience, and they need to be
supported by the provider’s business processes,
systems and networks.
New Product/Service Development
Product and service innovations can help create
“stickier” customer relationships and expand the
revenue potential of a stagnant customer base.
The goal is to create compelling new offerings for
entertainment, productivity and commerce that
entice customers to add incremental services to
their mobile services contract. Subscribers are
buying such offerings today in high volumes, just
not from the carriers. Apple, LinkedIn, Paypal and
over-the-top content providers like Netflix and
Amazon are delivering these services and dramatically capturing revenues, profits, customer
loyalty and — not surprisingly — market capitalization. Even advertisers are looking more to
Facebook, Twitter and Google to target wireless
subscribers on their phones than they are to
carriers — notwithstanding carrier efforts in this
area.
By tapping the subscriber’s digital footprint, or
Code Halo, wireless providers could realize a
vast array of new opportunities. This is particularly true if they borrow from the novel execution
strategies of companies like Amazon and
Facebook while leveraging their own vast data
stores to unlock previously unimaginable services
and revenue streams.
Here again, wireless carriers are investing in go-tomarket partnerships and innovation centers (such
as AT&T’s Foundries and Verizon’s Innovation
cognizant 20-20 insights
Centers) that are exploring ways to accelerate
the pace of new technology development and
usability concepts. But the ability to deliver on
the level of innovation, speed and infrastructure
that is often found in Silicon Valley does not
commonly exist at scale across
the wireless carriers, even as By tapping the
they approach fresh growth
subscriber’s digital
markets based on M2M communications (i.e., telemedical footprint, or Code
applications). In fact, for some Halo, wireless
providers, the M2M market
providers could
could be the immediate place
to deploy a new approach to realize a vast array
product and service innovation of new opportunities.
and development.
To get there, wireless carriers need to move from
network- and equipment-defined innovation to
market-driven innovation, creating an ecosystem
in which different types of partners come together
to serve customers. Traditionally, many breakthrough features were defined by the equipment
manufacturer or through siloed, time-consuming
and often sequential development processes.
Today, in response to customer desires, many
vendors — and even individuals — are creating
advanced services that are independent of the
equipment and run on top of the network, as
part of a new ecosystem. To better drive these
ecosystems, carriers need to rationalize and
integrate their control and network infrastructures to be more flexible and responsive to the
requirements of market-defined product development, rethinking their development integration
points, organizational structures and business
processes.
Critical to this effort will be establishing the
specific way each carrier creates the value it
will provide to make its ecosystem attractive.
(The production, search, delivery model that
we developed with MIT to help carriers address
this issue will be the topic of a future paper).
Ultimately, carriers will need to develop more
effective teaming capabilities, giving trusted
partners access to their network ecosystems,
for example, by making application programming interfaces and software development kits
available.
Operational Efficiency
Finding operational efficiencies will enable
wireless carriers to reduce costs in a market
with decreasing growth and increasing margin
pressures. In a maturing market, cost reductions
5

6. may be the key to improved margins. Clearly, U.S.
carriers have established the lead in deploying
LTE networks, which should create a path to
lower network operating costs over time. Yet fully
realizing those benefits will require retirement of
legacy networks and integration of the control
and support infrastructure
Carriers can save to achieve more flexibility
and lower costs.
— urgent priorities. Carriers also must understand
their own source of value to the market.
As operators have been
focused on M&A activity
and aggressive network
builds, many process and
infrastructure technology
areas also remain ripe for
optimization. For example,
many carriers still run
multiple separate systems
for operational support and business support
across services and networks. Consolidating and
rationalizing that infrastructure should yield significant savings, as well as greater flexibility.
For example, a company eyeing the wireless
market should consider the cautionary tale of
Facebook. Facebook debuted as a public company
in May 2012, with a spectacular subscriber base
of almost one billion and revenues of almost $4
billion. But analysts promptly called it to task for
its lack of a mobile strategy and mobile revenues.
By the second quarter of 2013, Facebook had
taken fast and focused action and had grown its
mobile revenues from a single-digit percentage to
over 40% of its total ad revenues. And the share
price and market cap of the company responded
dramatically, with shares trading at $26.51 on July
24, 2013 and hitting a high of $54.22 on October
18, according to company information. We can’t
know now if that will hold, but the episode illustrates the type of speed, clarity of objective
and ability to create measurable impact that
successful companies in this technology-driven
space will need to demonstrate.
Field operations and network infrastructure
are other areas ripe for optimization. Carriers
can save money by consolidating or sharing
functions, or even outsourcing capabilities like
field operations to a shared service or a thirdparty provider.
For U.S. wireless carriers, the inflection point has
arrived. Changes are afoot, and the market is
moving more quickly than the good news would
imply. The question is, how will the wireless
carriers in the U.S. respond to arriving at the
crossroads?
Looking Forward
Future installments of the “Wireless at a
Crossroads” series will examine strategies
for improving customer interaction, product
innovation and operating cost, as well as the rise
of the post-paid wireless market.
money by consolidating
or sharing functions,
or even outsourcing
capabilities like field
operations to a shared
service or a third-party
provider.
Virtually all wireless carriers have made some
effort to target one or all these areas. But
arriving at the crossroads makes speed, focus
and measurable impact — not business as usual
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank industry expert Clarence Mitchell for his contributions to this white paper.
Footnotes
1
Lee Rainie, “Cell Phone Ownership Hits 91% of Adults,” Pew Research Center, June 6, 2013,
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/06/06/cell-phone-ownership-hits-91-of-adults/.
2
“Mobile Wireless Performance in the EU and U.S.,” GSMA, May 2013, http://www.gsmamobilewirelessperformance.com/GSMA_Mobile_Wireless_Performance_May2013.pdf.
3
Steve Schaefer, “Record Wireless Margins Boost Verizon Profits,” Forbes, April 18, 2013,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveschaefer/2013/04/18/record-wireless-margins-boost-verizon-profits/.
4
“Verizon Reports Lowest Churn Rate in the Industry for Q2,” PhoneArena.com, Aug. 9, 2012,
http://www.phonearena.com/news/Verizon-reports-lowest-churn-rate-in-the-industry-for-Q2_id33174.
cognizant 20-20 insights
6

7. 5
“New iGR Study Forecasts U.S. LTE Infrastructure CapEx and OpEx Spending to Reach $95 Billion Over
the Next Five Years,” FierceWireless, May 15, 2013, http://www.fiercewireless.com/press-releases/new-igrstudy-forecasts-us-lte-infrastructure-capex-and-opex-spending-reach.
6
“Mobile Wireless Performance in the EU and U.S.,” GSMA, May 2013,
http://www.gsmamobilewirelessperformance.com/GSMA_Mobile_Wireless_Performance_May2013.pdf.
7
Kevin Fitchard, “Mobile Subscriber Growth in the U.S. Slows to a Standstill,” GigaOm, Aug. 13, 2013,
http://gigaom.com/2013/08/13/mobile-subscriber-growth-in-the-u-s-slows-to-a-standstill/.
8
“Wireless Quick Facts,” CTIA, http://www.ctia.org/advocacy/research/index.cfm/aid/10323.
9
Miriam Gottfried, “Competitive Clouds on the Verizon,” The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 17, 2013,
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304384104579141762143896676.
10
Roger Entner, “New Wireless Customers Chose No-Contract Over Contract 10 to 1 in Q1,” FierceWireless,
May 15, 2013, http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/entner-new-wireless-customers-chose-no-contractover-contract-10-1-q1/2013-05-15.
11
“One-Third of all Smartphones Sold in the U.S. Are Prepaid,” NPD Group, May 15, 2013,
https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/news/press-releases/the-npd-group-nearly-one-third-of-allsmartphones-sold-in-the-u-s-are-prepaid/.
12
“U.S. Mobile Market Update, Q2 2013,” Chetan Sharma,
http://www.chetansharma.com/usmarketupdateq22013.htm.
About the Author
Lee Taylor is a Consulting Director in Cognizant’s Business Consulting (CBC) Practice for the commu­
nications industry and leads the wireless line of business within CBC Communications. Prior to joining
Cognizant, Lee worked at BusinessEdge Consulting and Ameritech/SBC Communications and has over 13
years of communications and consulting experience. Lee studied geography at the University of Kentucky.
He can be reached at Lee.Taylor@cognizant.com.
About Cognizant
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