Thursday, August 23, 2012

COMMON TELECOM TERMINOLOGIES


The mobile world moves at a breakneck pace, and it's difficult to keep up without the technical jargons and abbreviations most industry insiders throw around. And they do love to toss those terms around! One has to understand and be familiar with these jargons and abbreviations to know the industry better.
Following are the few examples. 

ARPU : It stands for Average Revenue per User. The term is mostly used in context to understand how much a person is paying for phone bill. The average revenue per user has different components in it. Generally a mobile phone user spends on voice minutes, text messages and data transfer. Carriers also consider users extra spending such as wallpapers and ringtones in this category.

Average Revenue per User (ARPU) Erosion : ARPU erosion is the business condition where monthly average revenue per user continues to go downward for an extended period of time. The statistics show that the user spending has remained same despite the voice rates going down, also an exception to the Law of Demand! One reason for the average revenue per user remaining same is, customers are heavily spending on text messages and data transfer instead of voice minutes.

ARPPU : An acronym for Average Revenue per Paying User which is calculated by dividing up the revenue amongst the users who paid anything at all. This yields a figure that is significantly larger than ARPU.

AMPU : It stands for Average Margin per User. It is related to one of the criteria for measuring the success of a telecom company but less being used. It focuses on the margin produced per sold unit and not the amount of cash (revenue) earned from each customer. Thus, one can afford low volumes and still have a healthy company.

Churn : Churn is a term used to describe the number of subscribers who leave a supplier during a given time period. The churn is typically measured monthly.
Churn is an important figure in subscription based services like mobile telephony and pay TV because it’s an indicator for customer dissatisfaction.

MOU : It is an acronym for Minutes of Use; often used in the telecom industry. It is the total time which is measured in minutes that a customer uses his or her mobile phone during a day, month, or year.

SAC : It’s an acronym for Subscriber Acquisition Cost. It is an average cost of signing up a new customer. SAC is the amount of money a company spends for each new subscriber they gain. It is also most frequently used by mobile telecoms companies. The customer acquisition cost of mobile companies is complicated by the number of costs involved. Example includes mobile telecoms companies which frequently pay incentives to retailers who bring in customers for their networks.

LTV : It stands for Life Time Value and it’s calculated by multiplying Average Revenue per User (ARPU) by the average length of the company’s relationship with a customer. One can figure out the length by dividing 1 by the churn rate for the period.

For example,
If there are 1000 customers and revenue generated is Rs. 25000.
Then, the ARPU is Rs. 25.
Let’s take churn rate 20 % which means the average length of the relationship is 5 months. (5 * 20% is 100% turnover)
Thus, LTV = Rs. 25 * (1 / 0.2)
                 = Rs. 125

CPM : It’s Cost per Mile (CPM), also called Cost per thousand (CPT) (in Latin mile means thousand) and is a commonly used measurement in advertising. CPM as a metric is used in advertising across a number of mediums (TV, Online, Radio, etc). And as advertising moved online it continued the tradition and stuck us with this somewhat cryptic metric.

CPM is commonly used by Internet marketers to price advertisement banners. For example, a Web site that has a CPM rate of Rs. 25 and guarantees advertisers 600,000 impressions will charge Rs. 15,000 (Rs. 25 x 600) for those advertisers' ad banner.

Kaushal Joshi
Class of 2014

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