To the Next Billion: Mobile Network Operators and the Content Distribution Value Chain

Abstract

physical, and social well-being by making better decisions based on widely known or knowable information and content. For example, fishermen in poor Indian villages can maximize the financial impact of a grueling day of work through their insights into prices at the local market. Women can save their own lives and the lives of their unborn babies by knowing and acting on the warning signs of a highrisk pregnancy. In these cases and hundreds more, providing content that is either widely recognized as fact or that is easily acquired can have a tremendous impact. Recognizing this potential, social entrepreneurs in academia, NGOs, government, and the private sector have rightly rushed to create mobile services that provide important content and information to low-income people. Moreover, many of these services are having the desired impact on the people they serve. At the same time, however, it is difficult to view services that reach even hundreds of thousands of people as realizing the full potential of a mobile user base in the billions. If these services are so inherently valuable, why aren’t they achieving the scale that the mobile revolution promised? What’s going wrong? Other authors contributing to this journal have stated that access to a highquality, relevant content base is clearly a critical factor for the success of mobile information services. However, raw content alone is not sufficient to drive impact, no matter how necessary it might be. The process of bringing the content to the user is a critical counterpoint to content development. It is also a routine point of failure, particularly in low-income environments with poor infrastructure, where the distribution of content is much more complex than simply publishing it online. As one of the world’s major mobile network operators (MNOs), with 172 million customers in 13 diverse markets ranging from Bangladesh to Bulgaria and Myanmar to Montenegro, Telenor Group has worked with mobile content for several decades. In this article, I will share some of the insights Telenor and other MNOs have acquired about how to scale high-impact mobile content most effectively.