Tough choices
There's no doubt each side will argue it has the opportunity to partner to close gaps in functionality and expertise where needed. Amdocs, for one, is already working on interoperability with various DPI vendors for just that reason.
Operators will have to consider the risks in how they want to approach their vendors, or whether they will custom build something. While they won't want to tie themselves to one vendor, they also won't want to waste a lot of time and resources customizing.
"I would advise operators to look closely at their longer-term strategies for how they are going to move to convergent billing, and what that will mean for their prepaid and postpaid systems and for their existing policy management systems," said Mottishaw from Analysis Research. He noted that short-term point solutions that address immediate and urgent needs may not be the best choice when migrating to a global policy management architecture intended to prevent "stove pipes."
He thinks it could be a few years before operators really seek out any type of broad scale, integrated policy management/real-time charging solutions.
In the mean time, operators must decide what is urgent and what is long term in terms of their approaches to tiered pricing.
"This will get interesting when operators start looking for truly dynamic capabilities to respond to customer behaviors and to encourage more consumption - all in a profitable manner. For example, giving customers the flexibility to order services in a more on-demand, ad-hoc way, where operators pull in content from third-party providers in real time and make payments to content providers or resellers or advertisers according to what is consumed," says Mottishaw
More efficient apps
Enrico Lanzavecchia, a director at Value Partners, says explicit tiered pricing likely will soon become the norm in Asia (implicitly, it already when taking into consideration the detailed contact clauses). This will affect the development of new mobile applications, which will have to become more bandwidth efficient if they are to be mass-marketed. It also will put pressure on operators to accelerate the upgrading of their traffic monitoring and billing systems.
According to some OSS and BSS suppliers, he said many Asian players are lagging behind in the deployment of traffic monitoring technologies and, therefore, have limited knowledge of the consumption patterns of their customers' data usage.
He notes the trends toward efficiency and better reporting will probably increase the demands for transparency and service quality for subscribers, who outside Japan and Korea, are not enjoying very good customer management.
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