Field notes · 17 June 2025
Cohort notes from student SIM moves between dorm and hometown
What rainy-season dips look like when students carry two SIMs and rotate recharge habits with the academic calendar.
Student cohorts in Can Tho and neighboring provinces often hold a hometown SIM and a dorm SIM. Usage reporting that treats each number as an independent life will misread the rainy-season dip as churn when the traffic simply moved.
Ask prepaid product teams for plan codes popular with campus retailers. Pair those with tenure under six months and evening data spikes on weekdays. The resulting heat map usually shows a mid-term quiet period that recovers after exam weeks—valuable context before retention scripts start calling dorm numbers that are intentionally idle.
If frontline supervisors agree to short interviews, ask how topping-up happens during holiday returns. Cash top-ups at hometown kiosks leave different traces than app-based recharges near campus. Those mechanics belong in the study narrative beside the charts.
Close the pack with one recommendation retailers can actually keep: which plan reminders to pause during known travel weeks, and which to intensify two days after classes resume.