With the advent of data services, the mobile operator's business model is experiencing some significant changes. Increasingly, operators are being challenged to become full-fledged content aggregators capable of supplying differentiated services from SMS to video streaming and multimedia messaging.

To meet this challenge, operators are being required to see themselves in a significantly different way – as part of a larger value-bearing ecosystem where alliances, partnerships and third-party services are key to offering revenue-rich, innovative services. As a result, most new services will not be developed in-house.

To offer these services, operators will be required to open their networks to thousands of content and service providers – those in touch with the latest trends, technologies and user requirements. The only practical way to handle this multitude of services will be to implement and maintain an integrated, service delivery platform – an industrial-scale mobile kiosk - that can cost-effectively integrate third-party services, as well as deliver new applications and content.

Alcatel Mobile Kiosk Solution provides an integrated service delivery environment available for all players of the mobile value chain to create and manage mobile services for the end user. By delivering the tools to build a revenue-generating ecosystem, it does this easily and effectively.

As a fully hosted solution, Alcatel owns, maintains and operates the technical part of the Mobile Kiosk Service on behalf of the operator. As middleware on the operator's infrastructure, the operator keeps full control of the platform as if it were its own. He retains full control and ownership of its commercial strategy and subscriber base, and fully decides the sourcing policy, the pricing models, and the legal framework with content partners.

Service Benefits

•  Service aggregation, increased ARPU

To increase average revenue per user (ARPU), operators can use Alcatel Mobile Kiosk in 2 different ways: either as their solution to build-up their own multimedia portal or to build-up a true mall of mobile services by opening their networks to hundreds of service and content providers

As a pre-integrated environment including all main components for the setup of a multimedia portal, the Operators can launch a commercial solution in a few months significantly reducing the time to market.

Being offered in a service mode, operators can optimize OPEX and CAPEX by benefiting from economy of scales generated by the outsourcing of mobile kiosk deployment, operations and maintenance.

•  Future-proof platform

Alcatel's future-proof Mobile Kiosk platform ensures ease of integration with the operator's existing platform, as well as cost-effective, seamless upgrading.

Alcatel Mobile Kiosk has been conceived as an extremely simple tool to manage either by the operator or by 3 rd parties. All the administration and publishing of services is done through a web interface with different profiles allowing for different access rights on the platform.

For the creation of services, 3 rd parties can use the integrated toolbox of plug-and-play applications allowing for the creation of SMS, MMS and wap services on a few mouse clicks.

More experiences third parties have access to a simple but powerful XML-based API to develop outside of Mobile Kiosk their own mobile application, ingest content in the platform, connect to external devices such as customer care centres, data mining solutions, TV….

•  Controlled access and security

Third-party businesses are given controlled access only, providing stringent management of third-party rights to network access. At the same time, the kiosk delivers end-user protection mechanisms, such as anti-spam, anti-scam, and credit control mechanisms.

With more than 200 Mobile Service Providers (Mobile operators and enterprises) using Alcatel's Mobile Kiosk platform, operators can take advantage of a field-proven solution from an experienced partner with global support and reach.