Free guide: How to launch an MVNO?

By: Telness Tech & Jonas Cedenwing – 24th April, 2024

Launching an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) can be a complex process that requires careful planning, execution, and ongoing maintenance to ensure success. In this free guide, we'll outline the essential steps involved in launching a fully digital MVNO and detail how Telness Tech can help at each stage.

Jonas Cedenwing, founder and COO of Telness Tech has both launched successful MVNOs himself and today helps dozens of MVNOs across the globe – both from a technical and commercial perspective.

Step 1: Define Your Business Model

Before launching an MVNO, it's essential to define your business model. This will determine your target market, pricing, distribution, and customer acquisition strategy. For your MVNO to succeed in a competitive industry, where many players are selling the same products, defining a business model that addresses a niche is critical to ensure sustainable, long-term profitability. Telness Tech can help you with this step by providing insights on market trends, competition, and customer preferences based on our research and industry expertise.

We see, from Telness Tech’s industry expertise and ability to assess the pulse of the telecom market, that there are several factors to consider when formulating your business model in the best way, including:

· Market Research: Identify and understand your target market you wish to address and assess how customers in a given market is being served

· Competitor Research: For a given market, who are attempting to serve the needs of customers? And how? Based on this, is there a need(s) that these competitors are underdelivering on/failing to meet?

· Pricing Strategy: Decide on the pricing model that best fits your business model and target market. Will you offer, for example, product packages with bundle discounts, post-paid and/or pre-paid subscriptions, or perhaps customer specific discounts?

· Distribution Channels: Decide on the channels through which you will distribute your products and services. Will you focus on online sales, physical retail, or a combination of both?

· Customer Acquisition Strategy: Determine how you will acquire and retain customers. Will you use digital marketing, social media, referral programs, or a combination of tactics?

Once you have established the points above with a defined business model backed up with a business case to support this – then it is time to choose your platform provider. Telness Tech’s fully automated, cloud born platform allows you to serve customers across mobile (B2C, B2B and family), IoT, and PBX channels. This means that you can tailor your business model to meet the needs of different customer segments and offer a range of pricing options, distribution channels, and customer acquisition strategies. Telness Tech’s platform also supports self-service e-commerce, which enables you to automate the customer acquisition process and reduce costs.

Step 2: Choose Your Network Partner

Selecting the right network provider is a critical step in launching an MVNO. This decision will affect the quality of service you can provide to your customers, the coverage you can offer, the products/services you can provide, and the pricing you can charge. Deciding on your network operator depends largely on the business model you choose – from addressing retail with a low cost offering to tailoring towards SMB’s.

Telness Tech has established relationships with several leading network providers globally and can help you choose the one that best meets your needs based on factors such as coverage, quality, and pricing. Telness Tech ensures that network operator connectivity is achieved with an automation-first principle. The ‘how’ is addressed by Telness Tech’s experts by identifying and securing agreements, scoping the setup, data workflows and integrations with network operators that allow for provisioning and porting of, for example, mobile phone numbers according to the necessary national regulations and the network operator for network capabilities. This allows you, as the customer, to focus more time and energy on how you will communicate and deliver your offerings to your end-customers without handling the complexity of technical, telecom quality assurance of products.

Another critical element in this step is to apply for the necessary licenses you need to operate as an MVNO in your territory. Often your network operator, either the carrier directly or an aggregator, can help you with this step. In the US as an example, you need to register with the FCC and the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC) by filing a signed copy of certain pages of FCC Form 499-A with USAC. You can read more about that here.

Step 3: Choosing a Platform Provider

To build an MVNO platform requires expertise in software development, database management, and security. On top, this expertise needs to be couple with the necessary systems in place to run the MVNO’s business, such as CRM, provisioning, porting, etc. This step is critical as it will determine the quality of service you can provide to your customers and the scalability of your operation.

Here you can read more about how Telness Tech differentiates from other BSS/ OSS vendors.

Telness Tech has a team of experienced developers, an established platform that enables scalability, alongside the possibility to tailor to your specific needs, to ultimately ensure a seamless customer experience via Telness Tech’s white label ADT solution. The platform is fully automated, which means that key steps such as order and fulfilment, provisioning, porting, and invoice generation are handled automatically. This reduces the risk of errors, streamlines your operations, and improves the customer experience. Additionally, the platform has the necessary integrations in place with third-party services that are needed for your MVNO to succeed (for example, a billing partner where invoices will be sent to, a Chatbot solution, etc.). Finally, we will brand all the portals/interfaces in accordance with your branding. All these ready-to-go prerequisites allows your digital telco brand/MVNO to subsequently have a quick launch and go-to-market, where Telness Tech can remove the technical complexity and allow you to focus on other value-driving activities.

Step 4: Launching Your MVNO

Launching an MVNO involves several operational and logistical challenges, including SIM card distribution, customer support, and billing. Telness Tech can help you launch your MVNO by providing end-to-end solutions for SIM card distribution, customer support, and billing management.

Telness Tech’s platform is designed for self-service e-commerce, which means that customers can manage their accounts, manage the access-hierarchy levels on their users, top up their data packages, and access support via our online portal. This reduces the need for manual intervention, improves the customer experience, and reduces costs. Our platform also supports full automation of invoice generation for all of you customers seamlessly, which eliminates the need for manual invoicing per end-customer and reduces the risk of errors.

And of course, the launch being a critical test of your offering, branding, go-to-market strategy and many more commercials aspects - you want to be able to allocate as much time and resources here, not on technical difficulties and administration.

Step 5: Continuous Development of the Platform

Launching an MVNO is only the beginning. To remain competitive and relevant, it’s essential to continuously develop and update your platform with new features and capabilities. Telness Tech can help you with this step by providing ongoing support and maintenance services to ensure your platform remains up-to-date and meets evolving customer needs.

The Telness Tech ADT platform is fully automated, self-service driven and mobile-first user experience, which means that new features and capabilities can be developed and deployed quickly and efficiently. Our platform is also scalable, which means that it can handle growing volumes of traffic and customers without compromising performance. By working closely with you to understand your customers’ needs and preferences, we can help you deliver a user experience that meets and exceeds their expectations. Telness Tech conducts ongoing development on a quarterly basis together with customers. The Customer Success department is also heavily involved to ensure smooth communication between customers and product development – ensuring success through streamlining development to focus on what matters most to customers.

In conclusion, launching a fully digital MVNO requires careful planning, execution, and ongoing maintenance. Telness Tech can help you at every stage of the process, from defining your business model to continuous platform development. With our industry expertise and turn-key solutions, we can help you launch a successful and profitable MVNO.

We hope this free gave you insights, obviously there is more to launching and differentiating your MVNO – but hopefully we gave you a high-level idea on where to start.

With warmth,

Jonas Cedenwing, Founder and COO of Telness Tech