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EDITOR’S QUESTION
AHMAD SAYED, REGIONAL HEAD
AND VP SALES, MIDDLE EAST AND
AFRICA AT NEXIGN
B
lockchain is now, decidedly, not a fad.
It has reshaped several industries
worldwide, including here in the Arab
Gulf region.
In Dubai alone, initiatives around Blockchain
are proceeding at a heady pace. In October
2016, Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammad
bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of
Dubai, launched the Dubai Blockchain
Strategy, which aims to create a paperless
government by 2020.
In March last year, experts on a Smart Dubai
panel urged banks in the UAE to digitise in
preparation for Blockchain. And in January
this year, Dubai telco du joined with Dhonor
HealthTech to work on the country’s first
patient-safety Blockchain.
In fact, a report from Research and Markets,
estimates Blockchain in the global telecoms
market will grow at a CAGR of 84.4%
between 2018 and 2023, spurred by the
technology’s ever-improving compatibility
with Operational Support Systems (OSS)
and Business Support Systems (BSS). The
capability of Blockchain to map onto an
operator’s business functions, in ways that
add instant value, will undoubtedly drive
widespread adoption throughout the GCC
and beyond.
A full-platform Blockchain BSS has the
potential to open Communications Service
Providers’ (CSPs) business models to
reengineering on a scale previously unseen.
Consider the possibilities. On joining
the global marketplace, operators can
immediately publish product information, on
the distributed ledger system, for roaming
www.intelligentcio.com
visitors on their network, or purchase product
offerings from other telcos in the community
and then sell these either as-is or bundled
with other services and products, to their
own subscribers - this model is analogous to
a wholesale stock exchange.
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Not only this, as part of this community,
CSPs can also create complex bundles
with digital non-telco services. This allows
an unprecedented streamlining of inter-
operator collaboration on a global level and
the ability to offer individually determined
volumes and quality of service to
subscribers in their native self-care channel
and language. This is a fresh proposition for
the sector.
The very nature of Blockchain guarantees
trust between participants, facilitating
robust and secure sharing of financial and
identity information among mobile network
operators, non-telco service providers and
the subscribers.
Roaming becomes seamless for the
subscriber, who can now buy service
packages at will, and more importantly, at
local rates, from their home mobile operator,
without the need for a travel SIM or a local
SIM from one of the operators in the country
they are visiting.
The Blockchain platform becomes a
global community of buyers and sellers,
embedded into the BSS of each operator
and consistently adding value through the
optimisation of previously unwieldy business
functions. Operators, now capable of spicing
up the customer experience, will boost their
customer bases and their revenue, without
any significant additional costs.
Blockchains, like the one described, are
not theoretical, but real works in progress.
Platforms will have full support for e-SIM
profiles exchange (for both human
subscribers as well as IoT devices that
are now common-place in sectors such
as automotive, consumer electronics and
logistics), Internet of Things (IoT) Apps
tokens, non-telco services and application
service provider (ASP) subscriptions.
Operators will be able to tailor their own
authentication service as they see fit,
publish their own tokens and sequences,
and sell direct to partners without any need
for intermediaries.
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