Billing alternatives emerge

Billing for traditional, flat-rate access is not an arduous task, but as Internet service providers increase their service offerings or move to usage-based pricing, the process gets more difficult.

ISPs looking to offload their billing, customer care and technical support have two more options. GlarNet Communications Services is opening a service bureau targeted at small and medium-sized ISPs, while Solect has formed a strategic alliance with GTE Data Services to co-market a packaged billing and customer care service for ISPs.

Both offerings allow an ISP to private label their billing and customer care services, giving customers the impression that the ISP also is handling their service calls or billing. Both the Solect and GlarNet offerings let ISPs concentrate on their core services rather than get bogged down in back office operations.

"The [ISPs] that have been successful really know what their core competency is, and for a lot of them it's not billing," said Paul Atkinson, CEO of Solect.

GlarNet, Parsippany, N.J., was created by two former AT&T employees who designed the AT&T customer care and billing platform. The company is using Portal Software's Infranet billing platform and PropWeb's customer care platform.

"No one is serving the small to medium-sized ISP market," said Gregory Altonji, director of customer care at GlarNet. "We can help them offload the infrastructure costs and the costs that are associated with hiring and running a customer care division."

Another service bureau billing player, Convergys, also is using Portal software but is targeting larger, first-tier ISPs.

"Many of the ISPs that built their own billing systems are finding that their business models are changing," said Steve Sommer, vice president of business development at Portal. "Now, as they consider rolling out voice over [Internet protocol], multimedia streaming or broadband, they are finding that they don't have a billing structure that allows them to be competitive. These types of service bureaus will facilitate ISPs moving into more competitive areas."

Using Solect's IAF Horizon software as a base, GTE will market the package as a hosted billing application under the NETime brand.

Also aimed at small and medium-sized regional ISPs, NETime is a step toward usage-based billing service, including voice. Additionally, because it is presented as a hosted application, it can be priced much lower than if ISPs bought the whole software package.

"It avoids the large upfront cost that's associated with a traditional site license solution," said Linda Welsh, vice president of business development marketing for GTE Data Services.

GTE will have access to Solect's latest version of IAF Horizon, which includes several enhancements that make it applicable to a hosted environment. Included in the new package is domain name separation, a management console for ISPs via an HTML interface, support for prepaid billing and a rules-based rating engine that was co-developed by Telcordia Technologies.

"IAF has been [designed] to move away from the least granular-based approach to transaction-based," said Atkinson.

The result of that effort has given ISPs about 3500 service options when creating new applications. "We're starting with some bread-and-butter applications like access, news and hosting, but we'll move beyond that," said Atkinson.