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Prepaid Roaming
Services
Campbell McCracken reviews the issues
concerning prepaid mobile services for overseas
users. |
Postpaid
mobile phone subscribers have been able to use their phones while
roaming abroad for a number of years. However it's only recently
that their prepaid counterparts have been able to do the same. So
why has it taken so long, and what services can prepaid roamers
expect to see when they go abroad?
"There are some technology
limitations in the current networks as far as the demands that
prepaid roaming would put on the network are concerned," says Andrew
Smith, Product Marketing Manager for prepaid and partnership
management relationship at Amdocs. One of these demands is for
real-time communication between the network you are visiting and the
home network to prevent fraud.
"You have to rate prepaid in real
time," says David Fielding, Prepaid Product Manager at Schlumberger
Sema. Real-time rating is necessary to prevent users running up huge
bills while they only have a few pence left in their prepaid
balances. "What that meant was that in order to be able to bill
real-time, you need to have some defined standardisation between the
network making the call and the network you've got your balance on."
"Mobile networks haven't had well-defined protocols and processes to
do that," says Andrew Smith. Because of this, there is no single
solution currently being used. There are several interim solutions
that operators have put in place today until something more concrete
and standardised is introduced.
Another reason that prepaid is
lagging behind postpaid is that operators have been caught on the
hop by the rate of uptake of prepaid services. Although initially
prepaid tariffs were aimed at high credit risk users, they have been
adopted by many other users such that now 55 percent of users in
Europe are prepaid. "There's suddenly been more of a demand as of
late to drive prepaid roaming, particularly in Europe where
subscribers move from country to country pretty quickly and where
people tend to roam outside of their home network much more often
than potentially they do in the US," says Amdocs' Andrew Smith.
Temporary Solutions
A lot of the temporary
solutions to the prepaid roaming problem work by routing the call
back to the home network. For example, suppose you were in France
and you wanted to call a friend who was a few kilometres away. When
you use an access number to make the call, you are dialling back to
the home network and the home network sets up the outgoing call to
your friend.
So you end up with a call between you in France and
the home network, and then another call from the home network back
to your friend in France. With this solution you are charged twice -
once for each call - which is not good news for the subscriber. It's
also not good news for the network you're roaming on because in the
case of a call-back, it's effectively incoming calls into this
network, so the operators don't get the revenue for establishing the
call in the first place.
This inefficiency of the roaming
solutions and the dislike of them by the foreign networks has led to
the development and adoption of a new standard, CAMEL (Customised
Application for Mobile Enhanced Logic). "It's really the first stab
in Europe at standardised intelligent network protocol specifically
for managing mobile services," says Andrew Smith.
CAMEL
Standard
CAMEL is being deployed in phases, but the take-up
of phase 1 was not extensive because roaming calls were still routed
via the home network and you could still have two international
legs. "With CAMEL 2, what happens is that the foreign networks all
interrogate the home network and say, 'Can this person make a
call?', and the home network will say, 'Yes he can, talk to me again
in ten minutes'. So the foreign network had control of that prepaid
call," says Sema's David Fielding. So it's purely signalling that
goes back to the home network and the call is all handled within the
visiting network.
However CAMEL 2 does not yet offer everything
that the users need. "One of the problems with CAMEL 2 is that there
is no support for data services," says Sema's Fielding. "So you
can't support GPRS roaming with CAMEL 2. When CAMEL 3 is implemented
within the networks you'll be able to roam for both voice and data.
What is won't support is content, and it won't support certain SMS
services. Then CAMEL 4 will take that a little further, but [will
still not support] content rating. CAMEL 5 is reportedly bridging
that gap."
New Services
The killer application
today from the roaming perspective is still voice communication. But
this could change in the future. "What I believe is going to be big
are things like location based services," says David Fielding.
"Prepaid subscribers will be able to get location based services
just as postpaid will be able to on a foreign network." So if you're
in France and you're walking past shops, they may contact your
handset with a special offer they have on that day.
"There's a
lot of talk about everything from the entertainment aspect, there's
certainly some location based services, gaming, on-line ecommerce,
or m-commerce," says Andrew Smith. "So if you're in London, and you
need to go to Paris for the day, and you want to buy tickets to a
show while you're in Paris, you can use your mobile handset and
charge those tickets against a prepaid balance."
"Mobile
providers are struggling to understand the demographic of the market
they're going after," says Smith, "and then secondly what services
fit that demographic and how you can tailor services to best fit the
demographic you're going after." This could be difficult as
traditionally prepaid users are not required to register and getting
information from them could be difficult.
"No-one has all the
answers yet. No-one is really sure if there's going to be a killer
application. I think that the largest understanding is that the
killer application isn't going to be a [single] application at all,
it's going to be a collection of applications."
Traditionally,
prepaid subscribers have significantly less RPU (Revenue Per User)
than their postpaid counterparts, so there's a lot of focus to
derive new revenue from prepaid subscribers and to decrease churn.
One way they can try to increase the 'stickiness' of a service is by
tightly tailoring service offerings to user's needs. "Users might
think twice about churning if over the past six months they've been
your subscriber and it took them that long to build up their
portfolio and getting everything working just the way they want it
to - that certainly creates a lot of stickiness," says Amdocs'
Andrew Smith.
Another way of increasing the RPU is to
provide the value-added services that users want, especially once
broadband GPRS is more widely available. The new services will lead
to more partnering between mobile providers and service providers.
Mobile providers' expertise lies in providing the access - they
haven't had a lot of experience in rolling out services that are not
voice-type services. "They will partner with companies that provide
the content for SMS services, that provide location based services,
that provide the games and gaming services," says Andrew Smith. They
may also strike up partnerships with the companies that currently
provide portals, e.g. the Yahoos of this world, that have staked
their claim in the wireline Internet and now are looking to do the
same in the mobile world.
Billing Issues
As the
mobile technologies and services change so too must the billing
solutions. "A couple of the key things that we need to be able to do
is first of all communicate with the different network elements that
are actually going to create the event records," says Andrew Smith.
"Then, given that we're moving to these next generation value added
services, there's a whole new set of both applications and
application servers out there, as well as network elements, that we
have to talk to."
For example, the billing for a typical voice
call normally just interfaces with the switch. With new services,
billing solutions talk to both the access and the transport layer,
and have to work out how to collect information from the service
that's going to be transported across the broadband access. "So now
you're talking about collecting data from multiple sources,
formatting it into a usable format, and correlating the individual
event sources into a common event record that you can bill for."
A similar situation will exist with GPRS, where high speed
trunks will be set up between the roaming network and the home
network to facilitate Home Public Mobile Network roaming. "When you
start a GPRS session up on a visiting network, it actually sends you
directly back to your home network," says Andrew Smith. "So you get
into the concept where the service is still provided by your home
network and the transport's being provided by the visiting network.
You need to collect some information off the visiting network, some
comes off the home network, then you have to try to correlate these
two events, and if you're doing it in prepaid you need to have that
real time information flow, including the rating of the
applications."
Campbell McCracken is a
freelance industry writer and can be reached at mailto:editorial@rockpublishing.co.uk |
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