Quack

They call them Crackberry instead. I don’t have one; I’m already addicted to my trusty Treo, being a Palm guy for a long time, and wanting to take the next step of combining my phone and Palm into a single device.

Blackberry have probably led the charge toward the adoption of smartphones. Together with GPRS and now 3G, they have (more…)

Those pricing people at Telstra continue to impress me with their cleverness when it comes to innovative and customer-friendly pricing changes … pause … NOT! (I just see Borat Movie; I like).

You just need to know a few small facts about voicemail calling patterns (more…)

As the saying goes, “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. Because billing for new products can be so difficult, we tend to use whatever tools are available to get the job done.

At a recent industry conference, a speaker used the term “content apathy”; she was referring to the lack of exciting new content products that we can all use our fancy mobile handsets to access. Again, the barrier in many cases is the complexity of billing and integration of these products.

This is how I feel when it comes to (more…)

The next generation of coverage, speed, services has brought us the next generation of mobile phone plans. No, the odd characters in the title are not shorthand for me swearing, but rather the mandatory footnote tags that appear in every single (mobile) phone advertisement you will see, referring you to the all important information in the footnotes. The beloved asterisk, dagger, caret, and pound symbol are essential qualifiers these days to what used to be simple words like “plan”, “fee”, “anytime”. Don’t you pine for the days when “anytime” actually meant “any time”?

The early days of mobile phone billing brought us my favourite item in the smoke-and-mirrors toolchest: 30-second billing. (more…)

I recently attended the MVNO Summit in Sydney, where I heard from and lectured to people interested in this important sector of the market. As part of a market analysis session, the question was raised “why don’t PSTN providers also offer mobiles?”

We started off providing billing for fixed-wire services, and this was pretty easy, from both a provisioning, rating and pricing perspective. The service being provided was very simple, and the way it was sold was equally so. Some of our Partners expressed an interest in billing mobiles as well, and we helped them do that.

But mobiles are a whole other story. Firstly, the provisioning systems (more…)

Nobody likes to see their mobile phone bill increase month after month to the point where it becomes a major expense – especially in times of rising interest rates. And unfortunately one of the most common reactions to a big bill is to try and blame someone else.

Lately the finger has been pointed at the mobile phone dealers who gain recurring commissions on bills going to their customers. (See Mobile phone industry should come clean and Mobile users locked in and losing out). This keeps coming up (more…)