Big Data – Big Money in Telco

January 24, 2019

On January 15, 2019, a talk was held by József Szőke, the Head of Customer Value Management at Vodafone Hungary, about the potentials of the telco sector in data science. He gave an introduction about the incredible data sources that the industry has from the offline and online world.

Due to the geo-locations which are connected to telco data, meaning that the provider has a very good proxy where people move in the offline world, the demand is huge for using this kind of data sources for analytics. The most common use cases are deciding on locations for shops and understanding human mobility to improve transport.

Vodafone Hungary is currently working on its data strategy to be able to utilize the value in the data. Szőke believes that this data monetization might be the solution for telco companies to come over the offset due to declining traditional revenue. But it is not an easy process: respecting users’ privacy is an important task that the company is facing, especially after GDPR.

At the last part of the talk, we got a basic understanding of what kind of opportunities a data scientist can have at Vodafone and which skills the company is looking for in a candidate. Finally, the head of our department, Prof. János Kertész mentioned that Vodafone Hungary and the Department of Network and Data Science are working on establishing long-term research collaboration.

Blog post by Orsolya Vásárhelyi

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