Pipeline Publishing, Volume 5, Issue 2
This Month's Issue:
The State of Standards
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Bills Out, Revenue In:
BIMS 2008

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By Barbara Lancaster

The tone of the Billing & Information Management Systems (BIMS) conference was set early on Day 1, with an excellent presentation by Bob Webb, CIO of ACN. In describing his love affair with telecommunications billing systems, and yes, even those legacy work horse versions, he simply said: "A river of revenue runs through those systems."

Whether that revenue is calculated in real time, or tallied up at some point later in the month, was the subject of much discussion throughout the conference. At one end of the extreme, NTT DOCOMO described their new MoBills billing environment which handles a hefty 28,000 CDRs per second (on a platform centered on 50 HP Superdomes). Despite the fact that 90% of DOCOMOs customers are post-paid, MoBills calculates charges in near real-time, including application of eligible discounts with results posted on-line for customer review within seconds of completion of each transaction - a real feat at more than 1 Billion transactions per day. For Hong Kong's CSL, customer needs for near real-time views of charges are addressed by polling for CDRs every fifteen minutes, raw rating them, and having the details available for customer view within thirty-minutes. CSL's Peter Smith agreed that they are keeping an eye on the need to move at some point to a more real-time environment, but that currently their customers seem well serviced with the near real-time information.

There was complete consensus on the need for speed in defining and launching new services and new rate plans.



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high on the priority list was serving the needs of the parents, including knowing where their children are, even when the handset is turned off; being able to set limits on the time of day that services can or cannot be used; which numbers can be contacted, and how much money can be spent. There is even a "Grounded" option which overrides all normal privileges. The result is a fast growing customer base, with very high ARPU, especially for data-oriented services such as SMS, email, and web browsing - but only to sites that meet the U.S. regulators' requirements for child-safe content and tightly restricted advertising rules.


A most interesting new service provider sits in between these two extremes. Kajeet is an MVNO designed specifically for tweens and teenagers. Balancing what kids want and the controls that parents want is what Kajeet is all about. Working closely with Telcordia, the Kajeet team wanted to come up with a service offering that appeals to kids by presenting them with cool services and brightly colored, fully featured handsets (no "five button" phones for these kids!). Just as


There was complete consensus on the need for speed in defining and launching new services and new rate plans. Every vendor and every operator agreed that this was essential to being able to keep up with, or ahead of, the competition in today's highly volatile markets. For a very large operator like NTT DOCOMO, MoBills enables a new rate plan to go into production in one quarter of the time

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