Mar 1, 2002 12:00 PM,

Drilling Into Billing

Glenn Bischoff

What's the use of technology if you can't collect on its spoils? Carriers struggle with that dilemma when they lump applications under umbrella pricing plans, ignoring the true market value of the services in question.

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The situation is particularly vexing for wireless carriers working to provision premium data services. WaterCove Networks' solution is its mobile data service system, which is being tested by Vodafone Netherlands and Orange U.K.

WaterCove's system uses “separated intelligence” to help carriers distinguish between varied services and set prices based on the value of the service or its cost, then bill accordingly. By the end of the year, WaterCove plans to add a function for monitoring and managing individual flows, which will let carriers fine-tune their billing practices.

Flow monitoring picks up where separated intelligence leaves off, delving deeper into the session and identifying its characteristics. It's the telecom equivalent, apparently, of splitting the atom. “Getting to that level of granularity has operators very excited,” said Mark Tubinis, WaterCove's vice president of development.

Mark Tubinis
Vice president of development
WaterCove Networks

“The ability to look at individual flows and provide that type of information in real time into the service layer gives operators the ability to perform some of the really exotic charging methods they feel they need to stay in the value chain.”

Robin Hearn
Regional director, advisory services
Ovum

“The key is being able to charge on an event basis. A video postcard, for instance, may cost very little to transport over a 3G network, but the customer attaches a much greater value to that postcard compared with sending a traditional postcard through the mail. So operators need to develop pricing based on what the customer is doing and not on the cost of transport.”

Michel Lenoir
Manager of high-level design
Vodafone Netherlands

“We're going to have to deploy the service to know whether it's truly disruptive technology. But we're very impressed with it so far. Billing differentiation will bring more flexibility to the network and allow us to build new network services.”

SYSTEM STATS

Who: WaterCove Networks (www.watercove.com)
What: Mobile data service system
Features: Allows prepaid and postpaid charging based on time, volume, service and event; offers standard and open interfaces to third-party application and content servers; versions available for both GPRS/UMTS and CDMA networks.
Specs: Flexible mid-plane architecture; 14-slot NEBS Level 3-compliant platform; 12 slots for I/O cards; two slots for system control module cards; two PMC slots and one content addressable memory slot per card for network applications; redundant I/O and system control cards; SS7 interface for interworking with SCPs; GUI-based management.
Cost: Varies according to carrier specs.
Availability: In post-beta test stage; full commercial deployment expected in Q2 2002.