Turkcell boosts its B2B business with converged transport and cloud network synergy

Turkey’s leading mobile carrier Turkcell operates powerful FMC-based IP transport networks. Its early investment in public cloud services has paid off, resulting in a penetration rate in the enterprise service market of 25 percent by 2018. Now, Turkcell’s strategy will focus on eight sub-industries and continue to develop private line services.

Since 2016, the B2B market in Turkey has grown by 10 percent year on year. In 2018, the B2B market space in Turkey was worth US$4 billion, with private line services comprising 60 percent of the total value. In the same year, the Turkish Regulation allowed mobile operators to use mobile network assets to develop private line services, bringing huge market opportunities.

The selling points in Turkcell’s favor

Brand effect: Turkcell has inherent advantages in developing private line services, evidenced by their track record of building many long-term customer relationships through value-added individual applications such as music box and net disk storage. These relationships and accumulated goodwill power the sale of private line services.

Value-add for enterprise services: Turkcell began developing cloud services as early as 2016. Turkcell’s existing B2C cloud value-added services allowed the company to quickly provide new B2B services. The network + cloud business model promotes the rapid growth of ARPU and revenues. 

Five-step plan for private line services

Step 1: Build the teams

Turkcell’s sales team and our existing powerful O&M and service planning teams form an E2E organization that covers sales, planning, construction, operations, installation, and maintenance. This end-to-end organization has developed many new private lines in the 2018 B2B market.

Step 2: Upgrade network capacity with base station fiber resources 

When planning site location and fiber construction, Turkcell sought to preferentially cover vital business districts and technology parks. This allowed the company to catch up the main incumbent in terms of the fiber coverage rate in these districts, paving the way for Turkcell to develop private line services. Using existing base station resources to develop B2B services has helped Turkcell reduce equipment room and power supply requirements and O&M costs. The payback period for B2B services is less than two years.

Turkcell upgraded its transport network to meet the surging traffic requirements of 5G services and cloud-based B2B services, using base station fibers as the main solution for developing B2B and mobile services on the same transport network. 

Step 3: Quickly provision private line services with differentiated SLAs

The emergence of the digital economy in Turkey means that many small and medium Internet companies have set up in science parks and business districts, with high demands on the fast provisioning of private line services. Turkcell reused IP RAN to quickly deploy fiber to enterprises and provision services for target customers, shortening TTM from months to weeks.

In addition, all private line services are connected using typical ring networking, ensuring service path redundancy, end-to-end network faults recovery within 200 ms, and service availability at over 99.99 percent. Providing highly reliable services via base stations is another important point for Turkcell’s service differentiation and brand reputation.

Step 4: Provide one-stop integrated cloud and private line services

In 2016, Turkcell and Huawei jointly developed a plan to provide public cloud services for B2C customers in Turkey. Turkcell provides these customers with IaaS (such as computing and storage resource leasing) and SaaS (such as cloud Wi-Fi, office communication, cloud storage, and online cloud conferencing). 

These public cloud-based VAS allow Turkcell to provide enterprises with a one-stop ICT service portfolio. When a customer selects Turkcell’s public cloud service, the private line service is recommended. Binding these services together is helping Turkcell to quickly and efficiently sell private line services. The package sale of binding these services enables enterprises to quickly obtain cost-effective B2B services.

Step 5: Improve SLA private line services and encourage new B2B service growth with fully automated SDN

We believe that B2B ICT services will soon be fully automated and cloudified. Given this blue ocean market, Turkcell should provide a one-stop subscription service experience for enterprises coupled with an industry-leading SLA standard. For example, to provide services more quickly, Turkcell is exploring the deployment of fully automated SDN to shorten the cloud service and private line provisioning period from weeks to hours, which will allow us to support various services such as flexible charging, bandwidth on-demand, and optional latency.