Category Archives: T-Mobile

T-Mobile exchanges stock for referrals in pursuit of new subscribers

GrowthT-Mobile US has launched its new #GetThanked initiative to engage existing customers, offering various rewards including stock in the company.

Building on the company’s view that its competitors only offer rewards as an incentive for subscribers to spend more money, the T-Mobile initiative rewards customers simply for being customers. While those who want to participate in the Stock-Up initiative do not have to spend any money, they do have to ensure their family and friends sign up to a post-paid contract, in a similar manner social media uses viral marketing to promote apps and games.

“Get ready for a gratitude adjustment, America! This Un-carrier move is all about giving you a good thanking! No strings. No gotchas. Just ‘thank you for being a customer!’” said John Legere, CEO of T-Mobile. “At T-Mobile, we already wake up every day working for our customers—so I’ve decided to make it official and turn T-Mobile customers into T-Mobile owners by offering them stock. And we’re thanking customers every week with cool stuff from brands people love. For free. Every Tuesday!”

Newer customers will receive one share for every successful referral, whereas those who have been customers for five years or more will receive two. An individual can receive up to 100 shares a year on the scheme, which is managed by T-Mobile’s brokerage partner, LOYAL3. Aside from the shares, subscribers can also receive more conventional rewards including free in-flight, Domino’s pizza, holidays to Las Vegas, hiking trips to Machu Picchu, as well as other prizes.

T-Mobile currently accounts for 15.8% of the US market share, according to statistics from Ovum’s WCIS service, which has been steadily increasing from 13.9% in June 2014. The Un-carrier initiative was launched in March 2013, seemingly as a means to differentiate the brand in the US, made stronger strides into the post-paid market and increase brand loyalty. While the stock initiative could be perceived by some as a PR stunt, it could have an impact on brand loyalty, as customers may feel more affinity to T-Mobile should they own a small percentage of the company, as well as acquiring new post-paid customers.

The overall Un-carrier strategy itself would appear to be a successful initiative, as the company recently reported healthy Q1 results including subscriber gain, revenue growth, churn reduction and an improved forecast for the remainder of 2016. The company claims it acquired 2.2 million customers over the period, marking its 12th consecutive quarter of over 1 million customer acquisitions. Ovum suggests T-Mobile were amongst the biggest winners of Q1 with AT&T bringing in 1.8 million new customers, Verizon 2.2 million and Sprint just 500,000.

OpenDaylight launches third open source SDN platform, announces advisory group

OpenDaylight has released the latest version of its open source SDN platform and cobbled together an advisory group to improve the feedback loop between deployment and feature evolution

OpenDaylight has released the latest version of its open source SDN platform and cobbled together an advisory group to improve the feedback loop between deployment and feature evolution

The OpenDaylight project has released the third version of its open source software-defined networking (SDN) platform, Lithium, as the organisation launches an advisory tasked with feeding technical insights learned through deployment back into the developer community.

The OpenDaylight Project is an open source collaboration between many of the industry’s major networking incumbents on the core architectures enabling software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualisation (NFV).

The community is developing an open source SDN architecture and software, the latest release of which has been dubbed Lithium, that supports a wide range of protocols including OpenFlow, the southbound protocol around which most vendors have consolidated.

“End users have already deployed OpenDaylight for a wide variety of use cases from NFV, network on demand, flow programming using OpenFlow and even Internet of Things,” said Neela Jacques, executive director, OpenDaylight.

“Lithium was built to meet the requirements of the wide range of end users embedding OpenDaylight into the heart of their products, services and infrastructures. I expect new and improved capabilities such as service chaining and network virtualization to be quickly picked up by our user base,” Jacques said.

The organisation said Lithium boats a number of improvements over the previous release of its platform, Helium, like increased scalability, native support for OpenStack Neutron, new security, monitoring and automation features, support for more APIs and protocols including Source Group Tag eXchange (SXP), Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP), IoT Data Management (IoTDM), SMNP Plugin, Open Policy Framework (OpFlex) and Control and Provisioning of Wireless Access Points (CAPWAP).

“We see OpenDaylight as a powerful platform for carrier-grade SDN solutions, which is getting more feature-rich with every release,” said Sarwar Raza, vice president, NFV Product Management, HP and OpenDaylight Project board member. “ConteXtream, now an HP Company, has been active in the OpenDaylight community since its inception and has made significant contributions to Service Function Chaining, an important capability for NFV. We look forward to our continued involvement in the OpenDaylight project to help enable widespread adoption of SDN and create a solid foundation for NFV.”

The move comes the same week the project announced the formation of the OpenDaylight Advisory Group (AG), a group composed mostly of telcos tasked with providing technical input to the OpenDaylight developer community based on deployment experience.

The twelve founding members of the advisory group include researchers and specialists from China Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile, China Mobile, Telefónica I+D, AT&T, Orange, and Comcast.

The organisation said the advisory group was set up to help provide technical and strategic guidance to the steering committee and developer community – in other words, to keep the open source platform from straying from the requirements of those deploying it.

Interestingly, apart from NASDAQ, enterprises seem relatively under-represented on the committee, which could see future iterations of OpenDaylight focus more heavily on those use cases – possibly over others more common in the enterprise.