Telecom Improvement

[mrgarrettscott]

After finally building a telecom firm, I can conclude that telecoms need a lot of help. Telecoms have two primary touchpoints for the player which are Next Month's Internet Pricing and Monthly Budget for Upgrading Infrastructure. It is basically a media firm offering internet service. So, how can these be improved? I'm going to quote some posts that discussed this in more detail back in 2018.

Brain wrote:

Suggestions from me to improve:
[*]Provide information about the competitiveness of telecoms. Customer satisfaction as a bar, Brand is important here too.
[*]Telecoms can align with mobile phone brands, mutually influencing their brand awareness.

Competitiveness is already present for Banks and Insurance Companies. It makes sense that I should have an idea of what a competing telecom is offering. The Brain also notes that brand is important. On Investopedia's 10 Biggest Telecoms list, three of the top five are the American companies AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. Regardless of the price, product offerings, or perceived quality of service of these companies, the advertising is consistent. In-game telecoms have no way to overcome the stickiness of telecom customers with advertising.

David posted a design draft for telecoms:

Below is an old design draft of the Telecom. The current design was eventually preferred over it because we couldn't identify any gameplay benefits of the more complicated approach, except more micro-management. At the end of the day, it is still a budget for building the telecom infrastructure that matters. If you see any potential gameplay implications that you approach would have over the current one, I will forward it to the dev team for their consideration.

BUILDING NEW INFRASTRUCTURE
It requires:
-Research to invent a new tech for the infrastructure.
-A huge amount of capital for building the infrastructure.

-Dial-up (56K)
>this tech needs not to be researched. It is already available in the beginning. You research it to improve the tech level.

-Broadband DSL (128K to 8Mbps)
>The parent tech of DSL is 200 tech level of Dial-up

- Broadband Fiber Optics (which uses fiber optic cables)
>The parent tech of Fiber Optics is 300 tech level of DSL

In order to build the infrastructure, you are required to attain at least 30 tech level of the tech. But the speed is low at tech level 30, so a good strategy is to research it to a higher tech level before building the infrastructure.

IMPROVEMENT OF EXISTING INFRASTRUCTURE
Research an existing invented tech to increase its tech level.

Higher tech level means slightly faster connection speed.

You will have to spend a small cost for upgrading the network to take advantage of the improved tech.

This design draft is 100 percent more interesting than what we ended up with. In it, we have logical steps of technology improvement. David notes that design wasn't chosen because the team couldn't identify any gameplay benefits other than more micromanagement. Setting up research and reviewing completed research isn't tedious. Technology improvement is typically applied automatically. If there is going to be a cost with upgrading, notify the player as is currently done with bank capital ratios. The player could choose not to upgrade at the moment because either cash isn't available or it is planned for another use.

Choum offered even more ideas:

Hello,

We'd need a way to differenciate telecoms. (you can MP me if needed i'm a network expert in an internationnal company for 20 years). for now only price help users to choose
Maybe a home user oriantation and a business oriantation.

I imagine something like QoL of cities for telecom (most of them based on R&D, training and investment):
- 2G/3G/4G/5G coverage (why not ISDN, PSTN, or X25 for old ones). We could invest in infrastructures for each of them (today we have only 1 global slider). like this we can specialize. Of course devices must be compatible (my old motorola phone bought in 1996 can't connect 5G, i'm angry LOL). with time users will use less 3G and more 4G, so infrastructures become obsoletes with time. Remerber that we talk about billions here
- service availability (SLAs) (user can be agree to pay more if connection is reliable)
- costumer support quality (do you like to wait 7 hours to get a pakistan holiner that can't help you at all? or do you prefer to have an instant hotliner with IT skill and speak your native language?).
- bandwidth available (good to have 4G everywhere, but useless if your core network is saturted), remember that users wants more and more bandwidth (maybe select costing by bandwidth)
- sevice availability (for exemple VoD or with own internet company, or with peering to another companie with fees), maybe rent a TV adapter for VoD like modern boxes
- is there integration with phone manufacturers (remember blackberry?) My company offer you 20% cashback if you buy my smartphone 5000.
- offer a VPN to secure your datas
- add the costing of the usage. remember when your paid 0.50 c for 1 text message? Amazing! All providers don't support unlimited communication or data. A simulation should reflect this.
- how to interconnect users of different providers? if verizon phone user want to phone to and orange phone user? what is the cost for provider? and for the user? how to garantee quality?
- add options like QoS, parental control, mail maybe (or add a new company for mails), low latency (for gamers or voice), firewalling, SD-WAN to make extra cash.
- maybe add new techs and production to build 3G/4G antennas, high speed switchs, routers ,etc

business options would be interesting to study :
- MPLS
- internet redondancy
- managed firewalls/VPNs or SD-WAN
- Mobile device management to manage all the phones of your company
- NoC or SoC etc

I think that we should consider nation population and not city population to make it viable (a telecom company should be able to build it's network in all cities but should have the choice, i mean not a global slider but one per city as i'd invest more on a city with lot of computer/phones users than on one with few users
Allow to build network between towns on world map (with high costs to motivate inter-provider peering contracts)

That's just first ideas but we could work them

While I don't think all his ideas could be implemented. I would love to see cell phone wireless technologies incorporated into the game i.e., 2G, 3G, and the like along with the internet technologies. Subscribers could mobile phone service and internet subscribers. Service quality, pulled from right from the Banking and Finance DLC, would be determined by repair time as certain percentage of customer will always have problems that require support. Repair time is lowered increasing the budget for techinical/repair support. Call center quality, which is improved with investment in agent training. Finally, quality of the useable service is address with technology level and infrastructure (bandwidth). Hoping, this post gets the discussion going on telecoms again. Right now, it is untapped potential waiting to be fully fleshed out.

[Zeke_Bohansen]

Marketing and Advertising for telecom companies is very important too.
When you are selling identical products for similar prices to the competition
you need to do a lot of promotion.

As new faster tech is developed, the old network does not disappear
instantly.

You should be able to roll out the new tech at different prices
while keeping the old network, with its subscriber base shrinking
and maintenance costs rising. And you should be able to shut it down.


A telecom company, could have several different divisions.
with different numbers of subscribers.

Some would share a network infrastructure and costs:
Landline phones
Cable TV
Internet services

One would require it's own network:
Mobile network

Maybe use the standard 9 box layout to control the different services ?