Building blind

After dumping boatloads of money into their 3G spectrum licenses, the pressure is on wireless carriers to prove that they are not major league baseball owners who mistakenly believe athletes are worth the price they pay for them.

Just to get on base, wireless carriers have to prove that the almost embarrassing chunk of change they coughed up for 3G spectrum was worth it. They must make 3G profitable and do it in a hurry.

Billing providers are lining up to for the opportunity to prove they can do more than help carriers save face; they can help make the future profitable.

The problem is that both parties are shooting at a moving target. Billers have to be able to bill when the services are ready, but carriers don't quite know what those services will be. How do you bill for that?

“You have to understand the difference between individual customers, and you have to treat subscribers not as a group but as individuals and develop pricing plans and feature sets geared toward individuals,” said Anil Uberoi, vice president of marketing for Xacct Technologies.

Xacct's recently released Xacctmobile platform for capturing customer-specific usage from the network may enable that level of granularity, but it's just the beginning. Capturing customer-specific usage and turning it into a bill will be extremely useful — but only once the service is defined and a value is attached to it. And that will be the service provider's job.

Sprint PCS will have 3G services commercially available in select markets late this year. By the summer of 2002, it expects to have services running at ten times the speed the operator currently offers. “I would think when it is brought to market we sure as heck better have our billing in order,” said a spokesman for Sprint PCS.

Although Sprint PCS has not announced its plans for 3G billing systems, the all-digital carrier believes much of its house is in order. “We have a seamless CDMA network that we built from the ground up with 3G in mind,” the spokesman said. “When it comes to billing and back-office support, we are in a great position to support those [3G] services.”

Still, even with a head start in offering wireless Internet and data services on its network, Sprint PCS, along with every other 3G player, must do more in the way of services.

As new services emerge, billers must develop systems to bill for them. Two principles should guide the new solutions: flexibility and migration strategy.

“Nobody knows what the future may be, but everybody agrees on one thing: you need flexibility to introduce a product, whatever it may be,” said Christoph Wilfert, vice president of corporate marketing for Geneva Technology. The U.K.-based company announced its pending acquisition with Convergys last month.

People also agree that carriers won't turn off one network and flip the switch to 3G. “The journey to 3G has already begun. It's important to install systems that can work with existing infrastructure and move ahead at the same time,” said Paul Atkinson, senior vice president of marketing for Amdocs.

As successful as Sprint PCS's formula has been so far, the company has left some wiggle room for vendors that have formulas of their own. “We have not ruled out other billing options for future 3G services,” the company spokesman said.

Citing the 144 kb/s speeds Sprint PCS plans to offer later this year and the services it would allow such as digital imaging, the Sprint spokesman said, “There may be other billing models that you and I haven't even dreamed of….”