Driving Revenues through Real-time Solutions 

In light of traditional revenue and profit streams being squeezed due to intense competition, Indian service providers need to undertake innovative measures to maintain their position in the telecom ecosystem. The high costs of 3G spectrum and investments in rollouts are further putting pressure on service providers, to monetize services, and drive adoption. With nearly 95% of the mobile subscription being prepaid, service providers will need to look at 'hybrid' pricing models for services to attract consumers and ensure retention. The need of the hour is speed, scalability, and solutions that will enable them to differentiate their services and drive greater revenues. Real-time charging solutions can help deliver these.

Globally, we are already seeing postpaid plans increasingly adding prepaid style features like 'hybrid' plans. These offerings provide more flexibility not just for consumers and business users, but also for mobile operators and their business partners. To support hybrid plans and enable a wider range of promotions for prepaid and postpaid customers alike, mobile operators in Central and Latin America (CALA) are upgrading their back-offices with real-time charging platforms. Unlike rigid legacy platforms, real-time charging solutions are far more capable of supporting the wide range of services enabled by 2.5G, 3G, fixed mobile convergence and quadruple plays. An important factor in enabling new services is the ability to quickly change service offerings based on the service provider's approach to the market, and vis-a-vis competitor's offerings. Service providers can react to these changes by reconfiguring their service offerings or issuing promotions, bonuses, and loyalty programs. As such, it is very important to have the ability to create and modify rating plans and promotions for new and existing services without incurring long development plans or modifications to unrelated services.

In India, some operators such as Aircel, Idea, Uninor, and TTSL, among others are already differentiating themselves with services that are real-time and personalized, such as per-second billing and per-character SMS billing and other innovative offers.

To ensure large scale adoption of 3G, Indian service providers will need to implement flexible pricing for the services. The real-time charging proposition ultimately is about control. For the operators, it means greater control over the type of plans and promotions they can offer.

For the customers, real-time charging means more control over their wireless spending and services. In the case of parents and employers, that can mean the ability to set spending limits or restrict access to certain services, such as no text messaging during school hours.

Control can also encourage or increase usage of services, even among price-sensitive customers or those on a limited budget, because there is less risk of being surprised by a huge unexpected bill. For example, with a real-time charging platform, an operator could provide outbound and inbound roamers with alerts, when they are approaching customer-set spending thresholds.

All these industry initiatives, along with successful real world deployments, point to a bright future for mobile services based on real-time charging. It's an opportunity that few operators and customers can afford to surpass.

In conclusion, as the market becomes less differentiated on headline prices and saturated in many parts of India, it is important to build loyalty. Loyalty can also be built with companies in adjacent business areas, for example, grocery or electrical stores. Ironically, allowing users to set usage limits can actually increase usage of services, particularly new services, as it gives people confidence to use the service knowing that they won't be hit with unexpected high costs. This can be particularly useful for content and data services, not just for mobile but in the broadband/IMS business as well.

Anuj Kapur
The author is country head, service delivery solutions, Telcordia India
vadmail@cybermedia.co.in