Service Providers Reveal their 2011 Prepaid Challenges & Strategies
Join the Q&A
As a consequence of the economic downturn, the surge of mobile data services and market maturity, the prepaid service arena has seen dramatic changes in the last couple of years.
In this webinar Amdocs and Ovum will comment on a joint research initiative which involved 19 operators around the globe, analyzing how prepaid service providers are reacting to this market shift and which major challenges they must overcome to implement their new prepaid market strategies.
This webinar will address:
>> How service providers see their prepaid customers’ demands evolving in their respective regions
>> What types of prepaid market strategies are being implemented in different regions of the globe
>> Which issues and bottlenecks service providers are up against with their current B/OSS infrastructure regarding implementation of their new prepaid market strategies, and why they choose to move – or not – to convergent BSS architectures
>> Minimal requirements of new charging systems for supporting the new prepaid market trends
Tags; Amdocs, Archive, Prepaid, telecoms.com
The Q&A session is now closed. Thank you.
Thanks, Bruno and thanks to everyone who attended and posted your questions. If you have any further questions for me, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at sara.kaufman@ovum.com.
Many of you asked to get the presentation deck, we’ll send it very shortly. Thank you very much for your attendance and interest for this webinar.
Multi media services including content (music, video, apps) as well as things like personalization features are of great interest to many of the operators we spoke with. This is exactly the type of added revenue operators would like to get out of their prepaid customer base. However, these are also the types of services that current charging and billing systems are limited in handling. So operators are limited in how they can offer these types of services. You also see an interest in multi-media in terms of the postpaid hybrid models we mentioned earlier. Allowing postpaid customers to purchase multimedia services on a prepaid basis on top of flat-rate plans is also an attractive proposition that allows operators to garner more revenues from postpaid customers while customers can maintain more cost control over their wireless plan.
Sara – Am Boston based. We’re developing a subscription service with US carriers. Would like to talk about relevance to pre-paid and non-US.
Have any questions been answered? I don’t see any answers.
I saw on the presentation that Amdocs is working with our competitor, I would like to know if you can work with different service providers in the same country.
Please contact me at bruno.francon@amdocs.com. We are meeting this situation in several countries and work in confidence with each customer.
Thank you for the presentation, it was wonderful! I was wondering whether in your study did you addressed the issue of flat rate data plan, whether this will be feasible in the next years. When I am saying flat rate, I am referring to a data plan without any limitations (no bundles of data or time, no limitations in speed after a certain amount of data/time has been consumed).
Many operators have gone thru that way and realized it was not sustainable for their business just because the network investment to address this additional load was not associated with a correspondent revenue increase. The trend now is to target more precisely those customers that need that unlimited bandwidth, understand for which usage, and deliver the service depending on the network conditions at this time – this is policy-based data charging. the idea is to satisfy greedy customers without impacting the qulaity of service for other customers. Win/win for the end user and for the service provider.
I agree with Bruno. Many operators, particularly in North America, came out with unlimited data plans which have served to fuel consumers appetite for data services. Unlimited was also a necessary step to get consumers to use data as a primary communications tool without the uncertainties of cost control. However, as Bruno points out, there isn’t anywhere to go from offering unlimited plans. While I don’t see unlimited plans going away entirely, I think we’ll see them evolving into more dynamic and targeted offerings that provide unlimited something with opportunities to pay on top of that unlimited service for additional, premium data services. You also see this happening with new offers for session-based plans like unlimited daily or weekly plans. It’s unlimited in MB allowed, but yet limited in terms of time.
Question for Sara—in your market study did you see any difference in the strategy for prepaid in major mobile groups (e.g. Orange, Vodafone, and Telefonica) versus larger independent mobile operators in a given country?
One of the major differences among independents and those operating multinational groups was this notion that the complexities of managing such large organizations with a diversity of networks, services, and billing and charging systems was an inhibitor to considering any near term move to convergent charging. And these companies have an even greater challenge in meeting demands of prepaid customers because of their multinational status and having to meet many more different needs of many different customers. So in terms of addressing new demands of prepaid, they have an even bigger task at hand with many more complexities and considerations. But it’s really these very complexities that convergent charging systems could help to alleviate. So some are forced to be more conservative than they might like to be with what they can offer their prepaid customer base. As we discussed, time to market with the right, new in-demand prepaid services is absolutely critical for all operators.
The presentation was brilliant, We are preparing a tender for a convergent charging system in order to offer the same products to postpaid and postpaid. I would like to how what are the more important requirements?
Simple question but it might be a long answer. Short answer will be: a converged OCS is a must, but it must go with a converged product catalogue, customer care, and network control layer. Please contact me at bruno.francon@amdocs.com
Which is the Amdocs PPS platform described today?
Is it a newer version of the PPS acquired by Amdocs from Sigvalue?
Amdocs Prepaid is a specif configuration of Amdocs Convergent Charging that addresses all mandatory requirements of prepaid and keep the stengths of our convergent charging solution. It combines the experience and assets of Amdocs Turbo Charging and jNetX technologies in one product.
Is there a more detailed list of benefits that could be obtained by implementing convergent charging that could be used to develop a strong business case?
Is there a more detailed list of benefits that could be obtained by implementing convergent charging that could be used to develop a strong business case?
Convergent charging solves many business issues, among them: extending the postpaid offer with better user experience and customer satisfaction by injecting real-time (e.g. cost control, spending notifications, bill shock prevention), enriching the prepaid offer with more sophisticated features, including sophisticated account types (e.g. hierarchical accounts for addressing the family market and enterprise market), launching new products/offers irrespective of the market (e.g. data wallets, prepaid international call/sms/data wallets); of course capex/opex cost reduction via the consolidation of charging systems. There are many angles to address convergence.
Dear Madame/Sir
Has the presentation started? I can not see it in the box, could You please help me?
Krgds,
Bence
Yes it has started – please contact Tim Banham at tim.banham@informa.com for solving any technical/login issue.
Any comments on multi-media services via prepaid?
Please contact me at bruno.francon@amdocs.com