Bell Mobility Chooses Alcatel PRBT and Prepaid-Postpaid Suite
Today's mobile operators must find compelling new services to fight fierce competition, increase ARPU, while compensating for a steady decline in revenue from voice. And they must do all this, while ensuring cost and management efficiency with a payment system capable of providing users with all the advantages of real-time charging.
Those were the issues confronting Bell Mobility, a subsidiary of Bell Canada, when it decided to launch Alcatel's Personalized Ring Back Tone (PRBT) solution. The solution would deliver Bell Mobility's new Caller Ring Tune service, together with the Alcatel Prepaid-Postpaid Suite.
Meeting the Challenge
For some time, Bell Mobility had been looking for a service that was not handset dependent, and which had the potential to generate revenue quickly. PRBT fit the bill exactly.
With PRBT, Bell Mobility Caller Ring Tune subscribers will be able to personalize the experience of those who call them by replacing the usual mechanical ring back tone – the tone that's heard until the call is connected - with selected musical tracks, sound effects or personal messages. Just as important, intuitive interfaces built into the solution will make it easy for users to self-subscribe, so they can purchase or change their ring back tones at any time.
Subscribers will also be able to manage their own PRBT profiles as well as allocate specific ring back tones to individual contacts or groups of callers. For Bell Mobility, that's good news, because real-world case studies have consistently shown that operators who offer personalized services to the right market can significantly boost revenue.
And, if the rapid uptake of PRBT in Asia is any indication, Bell Mobility has made the right choice. In Korea, for example, just after the launch of PRBT, SK Telecom registered record subscriptions with more than 25,000 new subscribers added daily. That resulted in a penetration rate of approximately 50 percent in less than two years.
Assuring Time-to-Market
As a strategic partner with Bell Canada for more than 15 years, Alcatel had already impressed Bell with its strong appreciation of time-to-market, a critical factor in Bell Mobility's Caller Tune strategy. That, plus the fact that Bell Mobility has been able to leverage Alcatel's Open Services Platform (OSP) to provide comprehensive support for the rapid development and deployment of PRBT also proved a critical factor in winning the bid. A robust and flexible application development tool, the OSP – an IT-based system – is capable of developing higher-end, revenue-rich services such as PRBT in record time.
The very same philosophy – leveraging the OSP platform in order to achieve cost efficiencies and rapid time-to-market - has also been driving Bell Mobility's migration to the latest version of the Alcatel 8610 Prepaid-Postpaid Convergent Suite. Being able to develop, as well as deploy PRBT and the payment suite on an existing platform, will reduce Bell Mobility's total cost of ownership.
Equalizing Prepaid and Postpaid Services
What's more, Alcatel's state-of-the art payment platform, in combination with the OSP, is meeting Bell Mobility's requirements for a flexible and scalable solution capable of evolving with a growing subscriber base, while providing a future-proof platform for other applications beyond prepaid. In this respect, Bell Mobility will be able to offer its wireless prepaid customers new services similar to those offered its postpaid subscribers.
The prepaid offering is also a significant differentiator. Currently, only 12 percent of North American mobile service providers use it, and research shows that prepaid helps with wireless penetration to the under 30s demographic.
All in all, Bell Mobility is now poised to increase penetration of the wireless market with an exciting new service, generating higher ARPU and more subscribers.
