The Big Three are looking to create interoperability between OSS

The three biggest infrastructure players, Nokia Siemens Networks, Ericsson and Huawei, this week signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to collaborate with a view to reducing Operations Support Systems (OSS) integration costs for carriers and enabling shorter time-to-market for new services.

The OSS interoperability initiative (OSSii) is designed to facilitate multi-vendor interoperability ‘up front’ between the OSS products of all three vendors, simplifying operations, reducing the overall integration costs as well as speeding up the time it takes to roll out new services.

The reciprocal agreement will cover fault, performance, configuration and basic network event and trace management for the northbound interfaces from Radio Access, Circuit Core and Packet Core network management systems. Under the terms of the agreement, the signing parties are committing to bilateral cross licensing agreements for multi-vendor network management.

Cross-licensing and interoperability testing is also open for other third-party OSS vendors to participate in by joining the OSSii.

“The OSS marketplace is a patchwork of standards and proprietary interfaces that are controlled by the IPR owners. With cross-license agreements, we want to help operators take full advantage of the best available products in our industry,” said Peter Patomella, head of operations support systems (OSS) business at Nokia Siemens Networks. “Openness and fairness have been the guiding principles in the agreement of the OSS Interoperability Initiative.”

The OSSii portal can be found here

Jaco Fourie, senior expert in BSS at Ericsson

In January this year the Global Mobile Suppliers Association (GSA) pronounced LTE a “mainstream” technology, citing 145 networks in commercial operation in 66 countries. By the end of this year GSA expects the figure to have risen to 234 networks in 83 countries. The rate of deployment has been impressive—there were just 17 live networks at the close of 2010, and 47 at the end of 2011.

The global LTE subscriber base grew ten-fold in the year to September 2012 but still represented a tiny fraction of the world’s total, at 44 million. Informa has estimated the end-2012 figure at 63.2 million, more than half of which are accounted for by US operators and the great majority of the remainder by South Korean and Japanese players.

It seems reasonable to conclude that LTE is simpler to deploy than it is to sell. Indeed the monetisation of mobile broadband networks is probably the greatest commercial challenge that today’s operators face. Those that fail will not survive.

For many years after its commercial debut mobile telephony was a premium product, billed at a premium price. Even as the wider consumer market opened up prices stayed high, kept aloft by a combination of scarcity, cost of provision and no small amount of chutzpah. Today, while traces of the premium mindset remain—visible in the charges operators levy for some international roaming services—the prestige has been steamrollered out of mobile by the sheer weight of its ubiquity.

Nowhere is this truth more bluntly apparent than in the challenge of pricing and monetising mobile broadband services. In many markets 3G networks were deployed in the belief that, because the technology was superior to 2G, customers would pay more to get it. That belief proved baseless for 3G more than a decade ago and it makes no morse sense for LTE today, says Jaco Fourie, senior expert in BSS at Ericsson.

“If the price of a service is well above a consumer’s income or disposable spending levels then they are simply not going to buy it,” Fourie says. “You might get a bump from the early adopters when you first launch but when the market is fully penetrated you’ll grow at GDP, end of story.”

In the face of this challenge, he says, his customers have two questions: How should they evolve their pricing for mobile broadband, and what do they need to change in their billing systems to make that evolution possible? “We are literally inundated with requests for workshops on how to monetise mobile broadband,” he says. “There is a constant discussion around how to structure broadband offerings, how to create different packages and which ones work in different places around the world.”

Operators have to start by being realistic about what the customer can afford, he says, and they have to be prepared to move beyond the familiar comforts of a bucket of minutes, a flat rate tariff and overage charges.

“We are seeing quite a lot of speed differentiation now, as not everybody requires 4G levels of speed,” he says. “But eveyone wants connectivity, even people in lower disposable income brackets. Operators need to segment to address these people, using specific service packages that allow them access only to the services that they need at a price that fits their pocket.” Operators can also use third party content to differentiate new technology like LTE, he says, bundling services such as Spotify or Netflix.

At all times, though, operators must give their consumers real-time access to exactly how much money they are spending, particularly when they own devices that consume data in the background, possibly without the user even being aware that it is happening. Many operators still have the mindset that all data is user initiated, he says. This can be compounded if those operators still view service consumption in terms of the time it takes for an action to be performed over the network. “This is a culture shock for operators,” he says. “On an LTE network, with the speeds that many operators around the world are now offering, you could consume two gigabytes of data in a really short amount of time. The marketing departments of many mobile operators are recognising the needs caused by this massive change in behaviour and the urgent need to inform the user about what they’re doing.”

Even when operators fully grasp the concepts of billing for mobile broadband services they will still face challenges putting them into practice. Mobile network billing environments are notoriously complicated, having been expanded piecemeal, often on a service-by-service basis. The immense complexity often renders them inefficient, Fourie says, adding that he had “one hundred times more” discussions with operators about evolving their billing architectures in 2012 than he did in 2011.

The more technologies and services operators launch, the more appealing the idea of a single billing system that can support them all becomes. Unhappily for operators there is never a good time to undertake a transformational project that threatens to disrupt service and (in the case of large international players) internal relations. The upshot is that the complexity simply increases, as Fourie explains: “More and more customers are asking for a quotation for an end to end, fully integrated B/OSS environment that they can user for new services, and that wasn’t happening two years ago,” he says. “But does this mean that they are going to transform towards that environment or is this just the same old approach of putting in a new system to deal with a new issue? I can’t answer that but I do believe the mindset has shifted.”

As it must. Fourie suggests that the acquisition and installation of B/OSS systems in the past were, “with all due respect to operators, somewhat careless”—because the industry was enjoying double or even triple digit growth and moving at great pace. Today the growth has receded dramatically, meaning operators simply can’t purchase with the kind of abandon they once did. But the pace of development, as we’ve seen, has actually accelerated, placing greater pressure on them to upgrade and evolve. It will almost always be extremely difficult, operationally, psychologically and financially, for operators to simply discard the legacy billing solutions that they have amassed over the years. Despite this reality, isn’t it always the ideal—from a functionality perspective— to look to a full transformation?

This is a loaded question for a vendor of billing systems, and Fourie shows due deference to operators’ need to retain and maximise their legacy installations.

“One would always look at what you can do to augment the existing environment to make it capable of dealing with the immediate business needs—that will always be the cheapest approach,” he says. “But there are certain things that you just will not be able to do efficiently with legacy environments.”

What he describes as the “nirvana” of full service segmentation, which allows operators to offer users access to specific data applications such as social networking, requires a level of integration from different elements of the overall architecture that is all but impossible to derive from legacy systems, he says.

Increased service sophistication and the bundling of third party offerings represent a wider problem. “Traditional B/OSS systems were designed for a retail business model in which operators sold phones and telephony to individuals and enterprises. Now operators are selling ICT to enterprises, which is a completely different thing, and selling consumers connectivity to a range of services. With these services you suddenly have a whole hoard of content and service proivders as partners that you actively onboard and allow to sell through to your customers. Traditional systems were just not designed for that.”

The notion of segmenting down to the individual is difficult enough to make reality in a single market. For international operators with a presence in multiple countries that are looking to leverage their scale by consolidating their various billing installations it can be even more difficult.

For these operators centralisation or standardisation are attractive options but there are serious hurdles. Data protection legislation often requires that customer data be stored in the customer’s home market, for one thing, which blocks any move to centralise. But internal politics could be even more problematic, with individual opcos feeling that standardised or centralised systems might rob them of the ability to tailor servies to their specific market.

Fourie says that his unit of Ericsson has been working on standardisation projects for customers for over a decade. And the learning suggests that individual opcos’ fears about their ability to operate with independence and flexibility may be unfounded. “Every individual opco thinks that their market is special. But when you look at all these markets there are actually only a few very small things that are truly unique,” Fourie says. “These are things that can be configured to be allowable or disallowable market by market.”

Data protection legislation is less easily circumvented. Ericsson has installed systems for customers where operation is centralised but systems are distributed, Fourie says, which does offer some savings. This is particularly attractive in developing markets where operators have high staff turnover, he says.

The firm is also currently implementing a centralised billing system for an operator group in three European countries, with a fourth to be added this year. Fourie doesn’t reveal which countries, but he stresses that the ease with which such systems can be deployed depends on how good relations are between the countries in question.

All of which leads, inevitably to a discussion of outsourcing and the cloud. “B/OSS has to run on cloud infrastructure because operators will stand up datacentres and consolidate their hardware to minimise cost,” Fourie says. “Over time the focus might move to outsourcing and XaaS but the initial drive to cut IT spending has to be in the cloud.”

Operators need to approach the notion of outsourcing their billing function with caution, he says. Anything that can be effectively standardised and made configurable can be outsourced, he argues, but operators need to understand that their commercial “identity” resides within their B/OSS systems. The packages they offer and the way in which they interact with their customer base should not be relinquised.

“There is a school of thought that we will move to outsourcing BSS,” he says, “but I don’t think it will happen yet, it won’t happen for every element and certainly not in the part where the operator creates and maintains its identity.”

Ericsson, of course, has a substantial managed services business on the network side. There have been suggestions from some quarters that big network vendors with a billing play, Ericsson and Huawei being the most obvious, are able to leverage network sales to undercut specialist BSS providers on price. Fourie rejects this outright. “That was common in the 90s when everyone did it, including Ericsson. Whenever there was a new greenfield operator the VAS, the SMS, the voicemail and the prepaid billing system were bundled in. That just doesn’t happen any more, because operators don’t buy network and B/OSS together. And if we did that we would be a bankrupt support solutions unit.”

Nonetheless, he says, there are benefits to breadth of offering. “Our solutions run from the network all the way to CRM and that’s not something all providers can offer. We see a lot of pull from operators because of this end to end connectivity.”

The Neomobile mobile payment system will be integrated into the Opera Payment Exchange (OPX) offerings

Internet browser developer Opera Software has teamed up with mobile commerce firm Neomobile to bring m-payment services to users of Opera Mobile.

The deal will see the Neomobile mobile payment system integrated into the Opera Payment Exchange (OPX), making secure mobile payments available to more than 200 million Opera Mini users globally. The system will allow users to buy digital goods and services through direct carrier billing in each country where Neomobile has mobile entertainment services.

Neomobile is present in 11 markets, in Europe, Latin America and India, with a portfolio providing digital content and services for mobile users in partnership with carriers, ranging from chat and dating to games and apps.

“The next step for us will be the integration of our Onebip mobile payment service to let merchants and other media companies to make the most of all the ways to monetize their services through the Opera Mini browser,” said Gianluca D’Agostino, CEO, Neomobile.

Sameer Merchant, CEO, Opera Commerce, said: “One by one, we want to partner with premium mobile payment service providers like Neomobile to give the convenience of mobile payments to our Opera Mini users.”

In common I suspect with many other longer-serving observers of the telecoms industry, the news that it has been all of 20 years since engineer Neil Papworth tapped out his seasonal text message to a friend and unwittingly launched what was to become next most successful service to voice, bought a wry smile to my face. It is tempting to look back and wonder just how we failed to see that one coming. The fact is however we didn’t see it coming and were collectively taken by surprise by the speed with which the world and his dog adopted text messaging as its second most favourite means of telecommunication. While we may find it deeply ironic that the fickleness of human nature could take a multi-trillion dollar global industry by surprise, we should look for the lessons to be learned from the experience.

The first lesson is particularly relevant to what is happening in mobile telecoms at present. Operators are currently in a difficult position because they need to invest in transformational IT strategies and infrastructure that will enable them to roll out mobile broadband services based on largely untested business models. The ability to put together service bundles of previously unimaginable complexity is fast becoming a reality, but pricing strategies have yet to be refined, or indeed defined. Educated guesses about what the end-user might want are finding some traction in services such as offering consumers a degree of control over bandwidth and enabling them to create hybrid ‘family’ accounts, but if nothing else, the history of text messaging teaches us that the best ideas ultimately come from the end users who inevitably vote with their feet. What operators have to do therefore is invest in systems which enable them to offer the very broadest range of services possible and their customers will soon tell them which ones they want and which ones they don’t. It may sound like a scatter gun approach, but we wouldn’t want to miss another killer app like SMS.

The second lesson is more generic, but is nonetheless important for that. It is that some unexpected development, often in combination with other factors, may send the industry off in a completely different direction than was originally intended and could even lead to the demise of strategies and technologies which had been considered integral to the future communications environment, despite having already attracted considerable investment. In the case of text messaging, the victim was consumer paging. Developed around the same time that GSM was rolling out, consumer paging was seen in the early 1990′s as an integral part of the future mobile communications landscape. Backed by some very innovative advertising campaigns and with the pager being punted as a must-have fashion accessory by the likes of Motorola and Benetton, Calling Party Pays (CPP) paging took off almost overnight.

At its most basic, the idea was that the customer bought a numeric pager with a pre-set number off the shelf with no requirement to register, told all their friends their pager number and hoped they were popular enough to be paged. A message would typically consist of the caller’s phone number, on receipt of which the receiving party would call the sender from either a land line or a post-paid cellular phone, if they could afford one. More sophisticated alphanumeric pagers were available but these were expensive and generally only accessible by monthly subscription contracts. Even so, there were plans afoot to establish a European-wide, alpha-numeric, consumer paging network dubbed ERMeS (European Radio MEssaging Service). Plans for CPP and trans-European, and indeed global paging for the mass market came to naught however with the introduction of pre-paid cellular.

Although originally intended for people who couldn’t pass a credit check, the general public were quick to realise that pre-paid cellular not only offered affordable mobile voice, but also an alpha-numeric messaging service which was far superior to CPP, so while it was still in its infancy and as quickly as it had risen in popularity, CPP paging became yesterday’s technology. As a consequence, the consumer paging industry went into rapid decline from around 1997 following the launch  of the first pre-paid cellular tariffs a year earlier. No-one saw that one coming either. Indeed, in 1996, many industry analysts were happy to predict a rosy future for consumer paging but, having joined the ranks of crystal ball gazers myself in recent years, I’ll spare them their blushes and leave them nameless. I will make one prediction of my own at this point however and it is that the next time such a radical change of direction occurs, it will involve business models and/or pricing strategies rather than technologies.

In conclusion, I believe that the 20th anniversary of text messaging should not be allowed to pass without acknowledging the contribution to the popularity of SMS made by Tegic, a pioneering company which developed the first commercially-viable and most successful form of predictive text messaging. I first met the company’s senior engineer and project leader Edward P. Flinchem, in the lobby of a London hotel in January 1998 as he set out to sell the idea to any handset manufacturer that would listen. From the moment he demonstrated the software it was clear that this was a very significant development in messaging technology.

In retrospect, it is obvious that text messaging was always going to enjoy a certain degree of popularity, but it was T9 which made it easier to use. In the process, T9 consolidated SMS’s position in the minds of consumers as the preferred alternative to voice calling and drove the almost exponential growth  in usage we saw in the first few years of the new millennium. Despite that, none of the blogs nor articles I have read celebrating two decades of texting recently, have mentioned Tegic, T9 or Flinchem and his team, so I guess there’s another lesson to be learned. It is that not all pioneers get their place in the history books. So to redress the balance somewhat, when we raise a celebratory glass to Neil Papworth, let’s include Edward P. Flinchem in the toast as well.

Dave Labuda, founder and CEO, Matrixx Software

Given enough time any market will move towards efficiency, says Dave Labuda, CEO of real-time charging system provider Matrixx Software, and confusion will give way to intuition. He offers the example of the grocery retail market, which despite many thousands of prices and many thousands of products, all of which can change from one minute to the next, has evolved to allow consumers to shop without confusion thanks to a level of efficiency that makes the navigation of a vast amount of data relatively simple.

The consumer knows, he says, that if they want to buy an expensive bottle of wine for a celebration there are just as many options open to them as if they want to buy a cheap one for commiseration. Market efficiency allows the seller to provide a product or service matched to whatever sum of money the buyer wants to spend.

The market for mobility services has yet to reach this point. In many instances operators have resisted moves to efficiency defined in this way, preferring to reap the benefits of higher margins than are truly justified. This may work in the short term, Labuda says, but it is not a sustainable model.

Matrixx recently conducted some research with analyst Stratecast into enterprise market mobile spend that threw up an effective illustration of inefficiency in action. The firm found that 60 per cent of mobile operators are leaking $20m/month apiece because enterprise customers are refusing to pay bills that are substantially more expensive than they were expecting.

Over many years enterprise customers have become used to predictable mobile bills for voice and text services. But since the widespread uptake of mobile data services—both corporate and consumer—bills for a large enterprise can vary by as much as $200,000 per month due to unanticipated overages, Labuda says. And, when that happens, the enterprise will as often as not simply refuse to pay.

“Even more interesting,” Labuda says, “is that some operators don’t even bother to send the bill when this happens. They just write it down to the normal monthly amount before the invoice is issued because they don’t want the confrontation. They just eat the difference because they know it will be disputed.”

At first glance this sounds like a simple enough situation to judge; enterprise customers are behaving unreasonably by taking what they want and refusing to pay for it. But Labuda argues that the fault is not all theirs, returning to his retail comparison by way of explanation. “Whose fault is it if you go shopping and you have no way of knowing what you’re spending because there are no prices on anything?” he asks. “The enterprise and its employees, the end users, fundamentally lack control over what they’re spending. Is that really their fault?”

The problem is already being exacerbated by the growing popularity of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). The explosive uptake of smartphones and tablets in the consumer sector has changed the face of corporate mobility, as employees begin to look upon their clunky, centrally allocated QWERTY Blackberrys or their functionally limited voice-centric devices with something approaching scorn. Factor in the increased usage of temporary staff and external contracts and you have a mass of personally sourced devices that people want to use for corporate access. Control and security, so beloved of CIOs and admin teams, are very much under threat.

One of the leading enterprise concerns with BYOD is the additional cost it might entail. How can they be certain that the bills they’re footing on BYOD devices relate to legitimate, enterprise usage? “You have end users with no visibility, no transparency and no control running freeform across the smart device space, doing whatever they want at the company’s expense,” says Labuda.

In the face of this trend, enterprise customers are beginning to figure out what they want. It might be that they’d like to specify that they won’t pay for any access to streaming video for employees while roaming, on the reasonable assumption that the video is not business-related. Or maybe they want to be able to define their liability by the hour of the day, paying for all usage between 9am and 6pm, but nothing outside of these times. Broadly, they don’t want to pay for anything that doesn’t benefit them—and their specific requirements are starting to feed back to the operators.

As is often the case, the problem for operators lies with their legacy systems, Labuda argues. That simple, reliable voice and text usage paradigm that enterprise customers became used to was easily managed by old batch-oriented postpaid billing systems. Real time visibility of what users are spending and the ability to manage the service in real time is, in many cases, simply not available to corporate customers.

“Enterprise is the last bastion of the classic, batch billing relationship—and that is because of scale and complexity,” Labuda says. “If you’ve got an enterprise customer that spans six countries and has 100,000 employees, the legacy billing system that’s built for it is very complex and the traditional real-time systems can’t handle that complexity. It’s only with the new, emerging systems that you can look at moving that type of relationship to real time. ”

Most of the network equipment that Matrixx encounters has the ability to provide the real time interface that more sophisticated billing solutions can exploit, Labuda says, and most platforms have the kind of flow-based capabilities that allow them to distinguish email traffic, say, from YouTube. “What’s really lacking is the on the business support side, in terms of the actual, real-time charging platform that can handle the scale and complexity of this kind of model,” he says.

With such a platform in place, enterprise customers can start to get access to the level of sophistication they’re looking to apply to their mobile spend. They can buy service in bulk and distribute it as they see fit across different departments. If an employee is on leave for two weeks that person’s usage can be reallocated to a department that, in that particular month, is generating particularly heavy usage. And employees using their own devices can be required to pay for whatever services they’re using on their own time, or for their own purposes.

Nor is this just about giving the customer what they want. Some of that $20m/month that 60 per cent of operators are letting slide can be reclaimed if the operators’ billing systems can offer proof to the enterprise customer that the usage was known about, requested and not blocked by the customer.

Here the use of self-service solutions is very important. But while the enterprise has full control over their service allocation and can distribute it at will—and in line with their own rules, checks and balances—it is crucial, says Labuda, that operators don’t relinquish all control.

“If operators give complete control to the enterprise then the enterprise can turn off all the transparency and claim ignorance,” he says. “What the operator wants to do is overlay certain levels of real time notification and visibility which the enterprise can’t fiddle with, because that’s the operator’s financial defence.”

Operators are famed for inertia when it comes to B/OSS upgrades, motivated by the scale of the job and the very real fear that, if you start to tinker with substantial upgrades, your existing billing functions might fail. Nonetheless, says Labuda, they are embracing the move to real time solutions for enterprise customers.

Operators’ first use of real time was a negative one, he says, as they used it to throttle back the service of anyone who had exceeded their spending or usage limit. Now they want to move to a positive approach, with more sophisticated pricing and transparency of spend that allows them to create upsell opportunities. And, he says, legacy systems need not kill their enthusiasm.

“When I look at the projects that we’ve got underway, in every case there is a legacy billing system that will be sitting behind us. What we’re doing is absorbing all the real time chaos and complexity and providing a nice batch view to the legacy billing system. It doesn’t know the world has changed, it sees things as it wants to.”

There is no hiding the complexity of the modern world from the people running mobile operators, though, and there’s never a good time to spend money or make a change. Timescales for the shift to sophisticated, real time charging solutions for the enterprise market will vary tremendously from operator to operator but, says Labuda, we might see some emerging market players overleap their counterparts in more developed markets.

“In countries with very high prepaid penetration, operators’ postpaid billing systems are almost exclusively used for enterprise customers,” he says. “There’s a tremendous financial motivation to move that relationship to real time and retire that legacy system because it’s very expensive to have to maintain it for such a small percentage of your customer base. In a classic postpaid world getting rid of that legacy billing infrastructure will be a very slow process, but over time it will become less strategic and less visible.”

The process will be slowed, no doubt, by the fact that some operators will choose the path of least resistance and eke out their flat rate enterprise charging for as long as they can, continuing to tolerate the leakage because it’s simpler. But the winners, in Labuda’s world view, will be the ones that spot the opportunity to strengthen their customer relationship by innovating.

“If you have an inefficient market that allows you to charge 1,000 times your cost for something that’s great—but it’s not going to stay that way. Efficiency allows for tremendous opportunities but you have to be aggressive and innovative to win.”

Wind's prepay customers can top up their credit directly through Facebook

Italian carrier Wind this week introduced a Facebook application that enables its prepay customers to top up their credit directly through the social networking platform.

The Ricarica Wind service was delivered by electronic payments specialist Vesta Corporation and is accessible via the Italian operator’s Facebook page.

Payment and user data accessed through the social media site is fully managed and processed by Vesta’s PCI-compliant payments-as-a-service platform, guaranteeing 100 per cent transaction fraud protection, and remaining independent from Facebook.

Users of the application, including non-Wind customers, can also send a top-up gift to a Wind prepaid number. Alternatively, users who find themselves running low on credit can send a begging request to friends to top-up their account.

Facebook has been smart in its packaging of APIs, and very successful in integrating social gaming and driving brand awareness through applications.

At MWC this year the social network began partnering with mobile operators to aggregate links to their billing systems and enable virtual-good purchased and other in-app payments through users’ mobile bills. This offering from Wind is an extension of that initiative and its notable that in February Facebook had struck deals with AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon in the US; Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefonica and Vodafone in Europe; and KDDI and Softbank in Japan—several of which are Vesta’s customers also.

Speaking to Telecoms.com earlier this year, Henri Moissinac, head of mobile business at Facebook, said he saw Facebook as “making these platforms more and more relevant for developers. We’re making them social, focusing on social apps.”

For Facebook, in a mobile environment at least, its greatest traction comes through the apps, on various platforms, as every time a user migrates from a mobile site to the app Moissinac says the company sees “engagement going through the roof” due to a better and faster experience.

Take Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), which late last year launched a self-care app for Facebook, allowing operators’ customers to personally manage their fixed and mobile telecom services from their phones. The app enables end users to check their balance, buy special offers and subscribe to services from their respective service providers. The app aims to offer an improved service from operators by allowing them to engage with customers where they spend most of their time online. It also hits a sweet spot with operators by setting up a self-care platform, freeing up the carrier’s in house resources.

Real-time data is essential for future mobile data biling

More than three quarters of mobile operators do not have real-time data available in their billing systems even though 88 per cent of operators believe it to be essential to the future of mobile data billing. The discrepancy emerged from an industry survey of more than 200 mobile operators carried out by Telecoms.com Intelligence, in association with Openet.

How to price and bill for data services is arguably the most pressing issue facing mobile operators today, as revenue per bit continues to come under pressure, despite the cost efficiencies provided by the industry’s gradual move to LTE.

Innovations such as shared data plans and contextual short-term service upgrades—such as the “turbo button” planned by Verizon Wireless—will be increasingly important to operators as they look to monetise mobile data. But the network controls required to implement these kind of services are dependant on the availability of real-time data.

The survey—The Future Of Mobile data billing—found that 94 per cent of operators believe the availability of real-time data to be important or very important for operators looking to apply network controls and notifications. For a range of services and billing models about which operators were asked, real-time data was given a high importance rating.

But just 22 per cent of operators surveyed currently have a post-paid billing system that provides real-time data collection and rating, suggesting that widespread upgrades are necessary.

But according to Openet’s VP of marketing, Chris Hoover, this does not mean wholesale swap-outs of billing systems. “Operators don’t need to rip and replace existing systems,” Hoover said. “they can take real-time data feeds from advanced collection and charging systems, and enable their legacy billing investments to integrate with real-time functions such as policy management and advanced customer care and marketing.”

The survey also revealed that operators believe the delivery of bills directly to smartphones offers far greater opportunity for upsell and convenience, with almost 80 per cent of respondents saying they believe this model to be the ideal means of bill delivery.

Download a copy of the report  by filling in the form below.

Telecoms.com Intelligence is the industry research arm of Telecoms.com

Telefónica Digital and Visa Europe have agreed a wide ranging strategic partnership to drive new business opportunities

Financial services firm Visa continued its expansion into the mobile payments space by announcing a preferential partnership with Telefónica in Europe.

Telefónica Digital and Visa Europe have agreed a wide ranging strategic partnership to drive new business opportunities with both companies to co-invest in the development of products and services in areas such as mobile wallet, contactless payments (NFC), acquirer services for mobile point of sale, and merchant offers.

Visa will also take up the role of Telefónica’s preferred partner for the issuance of branded payments cards and the development of related mobile payment services.

“Visa has been an important partner for a number of years in Europe, helping us to trial, test and ultimately launch mobile payments products,” said Joaquin Mata, director of financial services at Telefónica Digital. “This market has enormous untapped potential and through this partnership with Visa Europe we aim to unlock significant new business opportunities.”

In addition to Visa Europe, Telefónica has recently formed m-commerce partnerships with Sybase and Giesecke and Devrient.

Carrier billing is becoming popular in Russia

Russia’s second largest mobile operator, VimpelCom, has implemented a carrier billing model with Google, allowing users to purchase app store content via their mobile phone bill.

VimpelCom customers will be able to purchase Google Play content by having the funds deducted from prepaid credit or just added to their monthly bill.

A dedicated VimpelCom Channel within Google Play will also make it easy for VimpelCom customers to navigate their way among the 600,000 apps available in the Google Play store.

Mikhail Gerchuk, VimpelCom’s Group chief commercial officer, said: “the collaboration with Google will provide our customers around the world with a convenient way to access and pay for millions of apps, games and songs, significantly enhancing the smartphone experience in countries where banking and credit card services are not widely used.”

Recently, telecoms.com spoke with Andrei Ushatskiy, vice president and chief technology officer for leading Russian carrier MTS, after the carrier embarked on a revenue share deal with Google for Android apps sold in Russia.

Within the framework of the agreement, MTS installs Android Market as the primary interface on all of the MTS-branded Android smartphones it sells. Google has set up a special MTS-branded section in the Android Market to promote MTS-branded applications as well as those developed by MTS partners.

Under the revenue-sharing agreement, MTS will get 25 per cent of the revenues from each paid mobile application bought from MTS-branded mobile devices.

The two companies are also working on making payment for applications directly from the MTS mobile account available for MTS subscribers.

Samba Mobile runs on 3UK's network

An MVNO that offers free mobile data in return for viewing adverts has launched in the UK. Samba Mobile is available for tablet and laptop owners and offers users a range of interactive adverts to drive engagement.

Users buy a Samba SIM card for £2.99 plus postage and packing, and branded dongles will soon be available as well. In order to boost their data allowance users watch adverts that often require some interaction to make sure they are watched. Users can also add credit buy buying products advertised or buying credits outright.

The service runs on 3UK’s mobile network and Samba Mobile admitted that web usage may be tracked. Controversial material, such as pornography may not be watched using the service.

Samba was founded in 2010 by two mobile and advertising specialists and the firm said that it has financial backing from an international mobile operator and a number of very experienced and “well-connected independent investors”.

The offering bears a strong resemblance to that of Blyk, which failed to make the model work in the UK and instead became an advertising services provider. The main issue was that the network lacked the kind of reach the big brands targeted were used to buying through established media.