U.S. billing, mediation vendors board GPRS

Last week, two vendor announcements confirmed the revving of GPRS engines across Europe and that U.S. vendors are moving in for a piece of the action. At the same time, analysts’ revelations uncover potential flaws in European carriers’ early implementations of GPRS that may prove instructive to North American carriers. On Monday, California-based Narus and Nokia Networks revealed a partnership to provide network- and service-analysis products for GPRS and 3G networks. Under the agreement, the companies will integrate Narus’ mediation software with Nokia Networks’ NetAct Framework, which includes modules for network planning, configuring, monitoring and reporting. New billing and pricing models are expected to be one of the hallmarks of next-generation services. So billing and mediation vendors are jumping in with systems they claim can be configured to collect information from different types of networks and handle various pricing schemes, including per-service and per-packet pricing.

The goal of the Narus and Nokia deal is to design products that enable carriers to extract and analyze data from high-speed IP networks, for use in relevant business operations such as traffic analysis, fraud and billing systems.

Convergys also made an announcement this week. The Cincinnati-based billing and customer-service vendor has licensed its Atlys billing and customer care software to Orange France for use with the carrier’s GPRS service. As part of the deal, Convergys, along with Accenture, will customize the system, integrate it into Orange France’s network and migrate approximately 15 million existing subscribers to the system.

According to Randy Mysliviec, Convergys senior vice president of global marketing, Convergys plans to have the system operational in 2Q2002. However, the subscriber migration will take about two years to complete.

The deal is significant for Convergys for two reasons, according to Mysliviec. First, it represents the first major installation of Convergys software in Europe.

“It is our stated desire to be a major player globally,” Mysliviec said. “Now, we have marquee clients in all three major geographies that we’d announced we were going after: Latin America, Western Europe and, of course, here in the U.S.”

Mysliviec expects carriers’ movement toward 3G to fuel more sales of the Atlys product and says Convergys is preparing to handle the anticipated demand for Atlys as carriers prepare to launch GPRS and, ultimately, UMTS. However, analysts at the Yankee Group’s Europe research and consulting practice aren’t as optimistic about European consumers’ acceptance of GPRS services, if carriers’ pricing of the services continue as they have in early implementations. In a report titled “Mobile Data Pricing: Will European Consumers Pay a Packet?” the analysts said that monthly subscription prices for GPRS access alone are as high as $27 in Europe, compared to a $2.78 access charge for NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode service in Japan. In an announcement of the report, Farid Yunus, Yankee Group senior analyst concluded: While we understand the need for operators to recoup 2.5G and 3G network and service development costs as soon as possible, without lower and more flexible pricing we seriously doubt that consumers will be enthused and that a mass market will be created.”