Telefónica Digital and Samsung Electronics have announced a global agreement that will pave the way for their customers to benefit from the ease and convenience of being able to purchase apps and content via their phone bill. Samsung will be the first OEM to integrate directly with Telefónica’s billing capabilities via the BlueVia payment APIs. Under the terms of the global framework agreement, Samsung Hub and Samsung Apps’ customers will be able to purchase apps and music, video, books, games and learning services from their devices by simply charging the payment to their phone bill
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LTE is about data and people are still – generally – about talking to one another. So the question is ‘what do we do about voice and LTE?’ LTE is here. There were 100 million LTE subscribers in 2012 and 381 operators are currently investing in it, according to the GSA. As a result, IN platforms are potentially redundant, they don’t do data. Upgrading them increasingly becomes a waste of time. Operators are publicly acknowledging that they need to think like the internet. This means it is time for Real Time. There is a lot
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Data and voice plans without contracts have been around for years. In fact I can’t remember the last time I was on any mobile plan that involved a contract. These plans are usually very attractive in terms of rates and conditions because they do not include any subsidy of handsets and do not have time clauses. This is the original BYOD concept. They are usually dead simple to understand – you buy your own phone and get a SIM from an operator. You put the SIM in the phone and ‘voila’ off you go. You
Read More »The last few months have been an exciting time for billing. The whole business support sector is humming again. Operators are acting to remain competitive, investing in real time functionality and seriously considering the benefits of the cloud - whether that means SaaS, Cloud or Managed Service.’ BillingViews has been humming too, covering a range of stories that have hit the headlines. Our editor @finegold has been asking what they mean for billing – or whether they make sense. He covered Netcracker’s acquisition of Convergys’ BSS assets, proposing that it was the biggest story of 2012. He analysed what
Read More »Mobile World Congress is over for another year. Reports are mixed about how many ‘new’ announcements were made but several pundits were not too impressed. I did not go myself, preferring to watch the reports and attempt to manage the fire hose of announcements that were the Twitter feeds. Several things struck me. First, the ‘other vertical markets’ that we keep saying will use mobile technology to innovate their offerings were actually there. If you had said that Ford was exhibiting at the show four years ago, you would assume it was a gimmick, not
Read More »There was agreement and disagreement about roaming in the recent Telecoms.com survey. Both the wider industry audience of 1,931 readers and the 600 respondents who work for operators agree that the mobile industry’s view that the market works along geographical lines is out of date. Between 40 and 50 percent agree with this concept. On the question of whether mobile operators are justified in charging more for roaming there was, not surprisingly, disagreement. 34 percent of the industry believes that there is no justification, against just 24 percent of operators. Perhaps the most refreshing finding
Read More »Large international operators face many challenges and billing is a major one. In a broad ranging industry survey (registration is needed but worth it), Telecoms.com highlights a range of opinions from a panel of 1,931 readers, of whom 600 work for 260 individual opcos. The questions they pose around Billing are whether operators feel that there are benefits in centralizing and/or standardizing BSS. They are, of course, very different questions. 67.9 percent of the group believed that standardising BSS across the international footprint would be beneficial, while just 35.1 percent believe that centralizing it would
Read More »Like many, I am guilty of stereotyping telcos as lumbering giants unable to move fast even when their lives depend on it. For the first time, though, we are seeing innovation and bulk working together to produce some extraordinary results. Telefonica Digital is a classic example. Widely agreed to be the model that telcos should follow, Telefonica realized that it is difficult to innovate from within a telco – and its politics. So, they didn’t. They set up an innovations lab that is now producing innovative services and products and then scaling them with the
Read More »I am not going to Mobile World Congress this year, I thought I would watch it on Twitter instead, from the comfort of my own sofa. This is what I will be tuned in to. #billing – because it all comes back to billing. Why? As one VP of Billing at an enormous carrier said to me when I was under pressure to come up with a new name for billing, “you don’t need a new name, billing is huge. It covers everything from Order Management to Payments. Everything.” #BSSOSS – because even #BSSOSS comes
Read More »I came across an article in the Times of India last December that prompted a double take. Ever vigilant and always on the lookout for stories pertaining to billing, I was taken aback by a headline espousing “the latest in mobile technology to eliminate discrepancies” in gas billing. The story opened boldly with the statement that discrepancies in the monthly bills to consumers of piped natural gas (PNG) in the city of Mumbai ‘could be a thing of the past soon’, with the help of mobile phones. The plot thickens. I knew India was one
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