How Valuable is Telco Data?

One often hears it said--in the communicatiions service provider business and elsewhere--that a firm’s data is valuable for reasons other than keeping track of sales or ensuring payment for sales made. Customer data is said to be valuable and monetizable in various ways. 

Of course, the reverse might also be true: a company’s customer data might be less valuable than that provided by third party sources, at least in some cases.

Consider the results of a survey of U.K. retailers and e-commerce firms by Oxylabs.

That study found that 57 percent of respondents make use of public third party data by means of web scraping, the culling of structured website data. Just 51 percent reported using their own internal data 

source: Oxylabs 

That might bear on the question of “how valuable is your data?” “Businesses in the retail and e-commerce sector clearly have a growing need for public web data, and the interest in old school sources of information is waning,” says Oxylabs.

In other words, there are at least suggestions that a retailer’s internal data is less important, in some ways, than external, third-party data obtained by web scraping. 

As you might expect, external data is viewed as most valuable for forecasting. Predicting market trends and consumer demand; benchmarking against other firms and setting pricing are among the key uses of external data. 

source: Oxylabs  

What your own customers buy, in what quantities and when, in what packages and at what price levels, is valuable information. What is less clear, in the connectivity business at least, is how valuable firm customer information might be to third party buyers or users, especially when only available at an aggregated anonymous level. 

All of that shapes reasonable expectations for monetizing connectivity provider analytics. Telco data might be less valuable to third parties than many believe.