Telecoms19.03.2010

Pre-paid subscribers in charge

•    Visible balance encourages pre-paid mobile users to go beyond voice
•    Helps 24 million Mobinil subscribers in Egypt and potentially 3.3 billion users worldwide
•    Converged charging and billing reduces costs for operators

Today, 72 percent of the world’s 4.6 billion mobile subscribers use pre-paid services. A big barrier to these mobile users spending more is that they can’t see their current balance. Being able to keep track of how much they have left to spend, on the other hand, makes users more willing to splurge on mobile internet and messaging.

In Egypt, where most people use pre-paid services, subscribers are taking control of their spending thanks to a charging system from Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC). The country’s leading mobile operator, Mobinil, is modernizing its charging system serving over 24 million subscribers across the nation.

Mobinil will be able to provide more benefits to its customers as it ensures full control and flexibility over the different offers provided to them. It also improves the company’s marketing capabilities, via customer segmentation, and the fast time to market the different promotional campaigns introduced to the market. The new system instantly calculates any type of transaction and offers both the consumer and operator access to the current balance.

Mobinil CEO Hassan Kabbani stated, “Mobinil’s successful completion of this important and historical milestone is a confirmation of our continuous and long term investments into our network and IT infrastructures on which our valued customers rely for their communications.  Our commitment is to leverage on innovative and responsive partners, such as Ericsson, that can help us offer customized and tailor-made services to suit our customers’ diverse needs. Ericsson’s leading capabilities in revenue management systems perfectly fits our needs for developing our offering and services.”

Jan Wäreby, Senior Vice President and head of Business Unit Multimedia at Ericsson says; “Revenue management is becoming increasingly important for operators. By converging charging and billing, operators can reduce operational costs and offer much better service. Ericsson has performed over 50 similar transformation projects, replacing legacy systems by one single platform in live networks. These are complex projects since they require the seamless transfer of existing subscribers and services to a completely new system.”

About 250 service providers around the world are using Ericsson and LHS’s charging and billing solutions with more than one billion consumers.

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