>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.
In major European markets, operators use service providers, which also take
out retail margin, often even higher than the retail margin for prepaid.
On the other hand, prepaid means money upfront for the operators and lower
maintenance cost and risk. Usually, prepaid is the financially more
interesting model for operators in the consumer segment.
>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.
Prepaid service nodes today are capable to control voice, SMS and data.
Networks are rolling out the necessary upgrades, i.e. CAMEL Phase II for
GSM or WIN II for ANSI-41. I am not aware of any equivalent for PDC, they
may not have one. KDDI could easily upgrade to WIN II, other operators may
not have an option but to either drop the associated services or develop
something on their own. Notably, another benefit of using international
standards.
regards
benjamin
>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
[ excessive quoting removed ]
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Received on Tue Jul 31 11:34:11 2001