Carrier, billing vendor tackle international markets

Western Wireless International (www.wwirelessintl.com) is on the move. The carrier operates in Europe, Haiti and parts of Africa, and of its 10 operations, four have launched services within the past 18 months. Now, the carrier is about to launch in Slovenia, and is taking along what appears to be its favorite billing vendor, U.K.-based Protek, for the ride.

In late August, Protek (www.protek.com) announced it’s supplying an integrated customer care and billing system to Western Wireless Slovenia, which is scheduled to launch services before the end of this year. The deal marks Protek’s seventh contract with Western Wireless International.

Western Wireless International chose Protek primarily because of the vendor’s operating style, said Ian Beckett, Western Wireless International IT director.

“The critical issue here is software project management, the ability to implement and deliver what you say when you say, in order to hit a service delivery target,” Beckett said. “We find Protek especially satisfactory in that area.”

Beckett called Western Wireless International “nimble,” and said it needs an equally agile billing vendor to accommodate the need to implement new services quickly.

The seven Western Wireless International companies for which Protek has supplied billing systems have been brand new companies. However, in some cases, the companies’ markets have divergent needs.

Western Wireless International operates in emerging markets such as Haiti and Côte D’Ivoire in West Africa and in advanced markets such as Iceland, which is said to have the highest wireless penetration in the world.

“In advanced markets, significant value-added services will be offered,” Beckett said. “In other cases, we’re dealing with providing predominantly prepaid access.”

Beckett notes that at Tal, the carrier’s Iceland affiliate, there’s little difference between prepaid and post-paid services, a change from the traditional wireless modus operandi. Competitive pressures in Iceland led the carrier to offer prepaid subscribers more.

“Prepaid subscribers often have been very limited in what they can do in relation to roaming, SMS services and other value-added services,” Beckett said. “That’s obviously a disadvantage to the prepaid subscribers, who are predominantly young and adventurous.”

Protek is anticipating other emerging needs as wireless services advance and is developing product updates to accommodate those needs. According to Gary Miles, Protek executive vice president of sales, the vendor has learned quite a bit from its carrier customers outside of North America and from GPRS implementations.

The vendor plans to parlay that knowledge into more North American business.

“If you look at a number of the U.S. (billing) players that have tried to go international, they haven’t been that successful,” Miles said. “But a number of the international players that have gone to the U.S. have been rather successful, like Amdocs (www.amdocs.com) or LHS (now part of SchlumbergerSema www.sema.com). So the experience that we have to offer and the way the products have been shaped on the international market makes it a downhill sale for us in the United States.”

Within the past year, Protek has opened a U.S. office and has been seeking deals with U.S. carriers.

“We’ve got a lot of interesting prospects in our pipeline,” Miles said. “A number of them (are) GSM wireless data, and I think we’re going to win that business.”

The biggest carrier challenge in the 2.5G, GPRS world involves educating subscribers about how to use GPRS services and about how they’re being charged for the services, Miles said.

Helping carriers deal with the subscriber-education issue presented a design challenge for Protek’s system developers. Ultimately, the vendor incorporated a feature into its customer-care system that lets CSRs receive answers to GPRS questions through a help screen.

Miles said two of the biggest billing changes of 2.5G and 3G are the needs to rate for data and to rate according to quality-of-service parameters. Protek plans to release a next-generation billing system in the first half of next year that will include rating for service-level agreements, as well as rating for UMTS networks.

Right now, the vendor is tracking 3G developments with an eye for what kinds of billing functions might be needed in the future.

“Right now, UMTS handsets are not available, and trials are only beginning,” Miles said. “The marketers aren’t exactly sure how they’re going to recoup their investment from a revenue assurance and revenue generation perspective, and we’re just doing our best to work with them to make sure that we stay ahead of that.”

Protek also is planning an OSS suite, which will include the ability to inventory the entire network, provision according to quality-of-service requirements and rate in real time.

Snapshot of WWI

Carrier Name	Location	Launch Date
Tele.ring Telekom Service GmbH	Austria	May 2000
NuevaTel*	Bolivia	November 2000
CORA de Comstar*	Côte D’Ivoire	September 2000
VIPnet	Croatia	July 1999
MagtiCom*	Georgia	September 1997
Western Telesystems (“Westel”)*	Ghana	February 1998
Communication Cellulaire d’Haiti ("Comcel")	Haiti	September 1999
TAL*	Iceland	May 1998
Meteor Mobile Communications (“Meteor”)*	Ireland	February 2001
Western Wireless Slovenia*	Slovenia	Scheduled to launch in 4Q2001

*Billing system provided by Protek in these locations