There are two "issues" with pre-paid and content billing:
I. Retail margin. When the pre-paid cards are sold through retail outlets
the retailers keep a margin of around 20%. This means that for a pre-paid
card sold to the customer for e.g. 100 SEK, the operator is left with only
80. The customer thinks he has 100 SEK to spend on content, but the
operator who is going to pay, will be reluctant to pay more than 80.
II. Real-time billing. The content billing system must work in real-time to
avoid that the user customer ends up with a negative balance on his
account. It is not good enough to generate CDR´s that are imported in
batch.
Best
Stefan
"Graham Brown"
<gbrown@wirelessworld To: <keitai-l@appelsiini.net>
forum.com> cc:
Subject: (keitai-l) Re: prepaid and i-mode
Sent by:
keitai-l-bounce@appel
siini.net
2001-07-30 20:23
Please respond to
keitai-l
Prepaid is not such a problem for i-mode. You can use prepaid for SMS - it
just
means the account has a credit limit as opposed to having none.
Prepaid was a great way for the operators to take up the slack in the youth
and
first-time market. Now that most of this has been captured, they're looking
to
move this people onto contract.
Graham
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-----Original Message-----From: keitai-l-bounce@appelsiini.net
[mailto:keitai-l-bounce@appelsiini.net]On Behalf Of Tony Chan
Sent: 30 July 2001 08:24
To: keitai-l@appelsiini.net
Subject: (keitai-l) prepaid and i-mode
Prepaid is big in Europe and I assume with KPN as well. Then there is
the i-mode business model, which inherently relies on DoCoMo's billing
relationship with the end users and content providers -- in order to
charge monthly subscriptions to content sites and then share that
revenue with the content provider. So how will i-mode work with prepaid
customers who have no billing connection with operators and or the
content provider.
There are other payment methods for content providers, credit cards,
prepaid vouchers for the content, and so on, but there are obvious
problems with these (credit card for micropayments, distribution for
prepaid vouchers, etc).
Any thoughts, especially with prepaid already taking off in Europe?
FIY, I'm a journalist and currently working on such a story. I will not
quote any opinions off this list without the permission of the writer.
Facts, such as "prepaid mobile in Italy is now about 90%," will be
verified but not attributed to the writer. You can also contact me
off-list for a more indept discussion.
Cheers,
Tony Chan
Editor
Wireless Asia
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Received on Tue Jul 31 09:50:24 2001