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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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