The bigger challenge

Billing in the new wireless environment presents many formidable obstacles

As wireless services providers shift from their traditional voice services environment to the new world of Internet-based applications delivered to wireless devices, dozens of billing and service issues promise to be a big challenge.

Providers will have to juggle billing systems and requirements against the availability of new Internet-based services, where time and distance pricing may have no correlation to the value of the service to the consumer. They also must consider new service plans for roaming, prepaid and other offerings entailing real-time accounting. Also important to note are location-based services, where new legal challenges and value propositions exist. Also, providers face greater needs for fraud detection and error recovery, and increasingly stringent regulatory demands for fairness and audit trails.

Of course, remaining are the omnipresent spiraling costs of licenses worldwide, industry consolidations and the sheer technical high jump of developing, building and deploying the next generation of wireless infrastructure.

The new world Admittedly, the ability to receive Internet-based, location-specific information, including video, music, graphics and other file types, is attractive to mobile consumers. A corporate manager, for example, could send a video clip or design diagram to a sales representative's personal digital assistant over a Bluetooth short-range radio-wave network at a customer premises. On being shown this mini-presentation, the client might suspect the sales rep was carrying around the equivalent of a desktop PC.

Or a financial or import trader may want to both receive stock quotes and then make a buy/sell transaction - two small tasks technically, but with huge value to that trader. Or service providers themselves will want to provision a phone by downloading the start-up information and network designation.

It's useful to note that U.S. mobile services providers are not the first to face this new world. Data-services billing questions are now being addressed in European countries moving to general packet radio service (GPRS) packet-switched networks to handle data transmissions. Further, many wireless service providers have found solutions in deploying IP mediation technologies similar to those used by ISPs worldwide.

What some European mobile providers have found is that IP mediation technologies can be used to measure packet data from the air interfaces and the data interfaces, either IP or Wireless Application Protocol (WAP).

Enlisting the IP technologies has enabled content-based billing for wireless IP services such as mobile commerce. Providers have found that this same data can be used to better understand customer usage as well as design marketing programs and services plans to better fit customer needs.

The European experience peels back some of the issues in implementing this new level of service in the U.S., whether the providers are radio access network operators, traditional large telecom providers or the fast-emerging "X" service providers.

In Europe, mobile service providers already have begun to embrace the new data applications services because they have reached 70% penetration of the marketplace, in contrast to the estimated 30% in the U.S.

Traditionally, billing systems for mobile providers captured a small number of variables - time, distance, start and end - and generated a record, typically in a batch process, to be billed at some later date. However, such batch systems are inadequate for the complex data applications now planned. And while real-time solutions have evolved for the growing number of prepaid customers who buy credit in advance to authorize service, these need significant reengineering to allow roaming and support for mobile e-services.

Worldly and wise Today's savvy customers want to be able to use their same phones while on business travel or vacation, roaming from one region to another and from one service provider to another. Roaming is a key requirement from the most profitable and loyal mobile customers, whom the European providers have labeled trendsetters. In enabling customers to roam, providers must additionally account for sharing of revenues - not just among the other access providers, but now among the varying providers of location specific Web-based information.

Drawing on the European experience, here are a few of the added questions and challenges in providing content and Internet-based services to the new-breed customer:

l What Web services will trendsetters actually use and tell their friends about?

l How should providers charge for value-added services that come from the provider's own customized portals?

l How should providers charge for services that come from partners providing Internet portals or other enhanced information such as financial quotes? And how should they share revenues among all these partners?

l How do they ensure that a roaming consumer's home network is informed and charged for the use of the roamed network's resources?

l How can providers gauge the value of information to a consumer if the customer accesses an unfamiliar Internet site?

l How can providers transmit - but not charge for - 10-second video advertisements?

l How do they confirm for the provider and the above corporate manager that the desired data object was downloaded and received and then pass this information to the billing system?

To begin to answer such questions and then bill for these new services, information on all segments of this complex value chain - the services, rating models, actual usage and customers themselves - must be gathered and analyzed.

Performing this analysis goes beyond what was done with simple voice plans and requires an advanced information system that integrates wireless, Internet and other data. All the event data must be correlated, attached to a flexible charging record and passed along to operation and support systems that are flexible enough to represent it.

This is where IP mediation tools have enabled services providers to extract usage information from their networks, correlate the information and then use it for billing, business intelligence and operations management applications.

Prepaid customers pose an added requirement: matching the customer's credit with the service charge in real-time. Thus, a provider's infrastructure must rate the service and account for it, a tricky challenge for the services delivered from Internet partners without cutting into real-time performance. The solution probably will be adjunct systems that will participate in informing the real-time systems of events they need to be aware of through new switch protocols such as CAMEL 3 and CAMEL 4 (customized applications for mobile-network enhanced logic). When the prepaid customer exhausts a prepaid voucher, for example, the switches will notify the infrastructure to shut down the session.

The new environment As the European providers testify, much of the impetus toward value-added services has come as a result of declining revenues from basic voice services as customers have come to expect ever-decreasing fees - at the same time providers have had to pay ever-higher license fees. By contrast, growing profits have come from creative services such as short message service - so popular with Scandinavian teens who delight in exchanging brief digital messages.

Now providers are turning to other value-added services, but doing so means embracing many new and mostly unfamiliar technologies and practices. Installing the infrastructure for next generation handsets and wireless devices - GPRS or GPRS-like packet-switched systems is just the beginning. Making Internet services via IP available to customers means mediating from their newly installed packet networks extensive amounts of data and information about that data as each wireless customer will want to link many different Internet addresses.

Providers, after analyzing usage, will have to develop creative ways to charge for and manage profitability. For example, because of the added overhead of setting up the session in GPRS, there may be a start charge for Internet access encouraging a user to maintain a session, with various cutoff points to encourage termination beyond that profitable time.

Providers have to determine new ways to charge for and represent value for their services because the value of the data communicated likely has little if any relation to old measurements of how much data was transmitted, over what distance, for what period of time.

What about that trader previously mentioned, who for example, wants very specific data services and wants the ability to interact - in this instance, buy or sell - via the wireless device? For the trader, what's valuable is the specific information and trading ability - values which likely have no relation to the transaction specifics of how much data was transmitted or how long it took.

Providing location-based information is one of the big attractions of the new wireless services, but similarly to the trader's transaction information, presents the question of how to bill for it.

What about the vacationer - say, travelling by car and looking for a gasoline station in Mexico - who only requires the roaming/location-based information for a two-week annual holiday? How do providers shape customer service plans to meet the needs of the trader and the vacationer?

New issues Today's savvy customer and the new generation raise the bar on yet other aspects of this new wireless business. Currently, developers, operators and manufacturers (cooperating through bodies such as the WAP Forum standards consortium) are at work on an electronic wallet capability for coming wireless devices. While the mobile phone could be used to purchase everything from $1 soft drinks to $500 to $5000 purchases, the question is whether services providers are willing to act as a bank to finance the $5000 car or fur coat. If so, then this is yet another business consideration to be factored with billing system requirements.

The same trigger switches that can cue IP events also can be used to stop or block call fraud by promptly notifying providers (particularly smaller retailers who contract with wholesalers) that possibly fraudulent calls are underway. Such prompts would come when one phone number is being used in two countries at the same time, for example. Here again this fraud information needs to be communicated in as near to real time as possible.

Then there are errors from the technology itself. These errors traditionally have been transmitted after the fact to error recovery systems, which reconstruct the incident and revise the bill accordingly. Such approaches will be under stress, however, in the new environment when there are so many more points of interface between networks, and where there are so many events running simultaneously.

Finally, in one major aspect, the providers' reality remains unchanged from the analog voice days: Next generation services need to comply with communications regulators' requirements and judgments of fairness. Providers have to be fair in setting their rate strategies and be able to demonstrate that fairness through audits to the government agencies - and now with the new services-across national boundaries.

Meeting all these requirements necessitates the combined efforts of computing and technical staffs collecting the data and information, along with marketing systems and teams analyzing it, along with capacity planners looking to the future. Effective billing for new wireless services requires the service management systems framework likely including IP mediation technologies, and advanced computer infrastructures - as well as the advanced wireless technologies.

The good news is that many of these billing-related issues already have been addressed in Europe and the U.S. in the Internet usage marketplace, where ISPs have scrambled to develop and then quickly upgrade billing management systems and infrastructures.

Over the last several years, ISPs have continually revised and upgraded their billing and accounting systems. This same sorting through and matching of business and technical requirements is now underway in the wireless environment. And, as the wireless industry has so dramatically demonstrated by its growth and innovation during the last decade, that need for open, flexible, adaptable billing and support systems will continue well into the future. n