The run-up to this year’s Team Action Week, held in Baltimore last month, was tinged with a little trepidation. What with travel cutbacks and H1N1 influenza fears, we were not sure how many would turn up and if those attending would be fired up enough to get things going. Any fears were quickly dispelled on Day One with numbers exceeding our Lisbon event in January and opening sessions marked with lively debate on a broad range of topics. The Revenue Management and Revenue Assurance teams were not only well attended,...

While chairing a BSS conference in Europe recently, something I’ve done regularly for more years than I wish to remember, it dawned on me that things were changing, and changing rapidly. The secure world of service order processing, billing, payments and customer care I had been accustomed to had changed. I called it a metamorphism, because the change was so gradual I had hardly noticed it. I was about to experience an epiphany of potentially life-altering proportions. The ugly, writhing caterpillar-like mass of...

Everytime we hear a story about mergers and acquisitions in the Telecom industry we get excited by the strategic opportunties.  There will be economies of scale we hear, there will be new marketing critical mass created we hear, and of course there will be huge benefits to the consumer base from more integrated services, etc., etc., .  This weeks story of the potential merger between Vodafone and T-Mobile in the UK is a classic example.  The headline stories are the potential $5bn price tag and the...

There are no new mistakes - just old ones that we make again and again.  This truism applies to all aspects of life and business, and never more so than to the launch of a new mobile generation.  It seems that everytime we begin the process of launching a new generation of mobile (1G to 2G;  or 2G to 3G) we delete the painful memories of how we got it wrong the last time, and blindly repeat the usual mistakes.  Lets try and break this cycle with LTE! First of all lets talk about the...

The speed at which Cloud computing has planted its feet firmly in the center stage of the IT and Communications world is quite interesting.  It's not a technology play - in fact I would be hard pushed to identify a single piece of new technology that is fundamental to cloud. And unlike Twitter or Facebook it's not a social-psychology phenomenom in any real sense - there is no "man-in-the-street' movement that is driving the uptake or need for cloud computing.  It is one of those rare beasts - a...

The topic of Net Neutrality has waxed and waned over the past three or four years as more fashionable and sexier topics have dominated the media.  But it has not gone away - nor can we expect it to.  In truth Net Neutrality is a central issue for the future of communications.  In its simplest form it is an argument about whether the people who provide and operate the networks should be able to charge differently depending on which type of service is consuming their network capacity.  The Operators argue...

Billing used to be so important for telecoms service providers that it lived in its own domain with direct links to Finance and IT. But how times have changed. Billing has been banished back to the back room again where it's just part of the broader BSS group. What's happened? Time was when billing conferences attracted thousands of delegates to prime locations like London, Paris, Rome and Cannes. And it attracted the brightest and the best. It turned out that billing people could really let their hair...

Just when you thought it was safe to stream all the video you want and download all the huge files your heart desires, pay-as-you-go charging models are back stalking the land and pressurizing “all-you-can-eat” flat-rate plans. In April, Time Warner started billing some customers based on how much bandwidth they used. As you can imagine, customers were unhappy when it was announced that the company would expand the trial run of this new billing system. The company relented, but not before saying it really has...

You may remember my angst when I launched the Charging Debate almost a year ago, as TM Forum embarked on updating the Business Process Framework (eTOM) to include “charging.”  The responses to the suggested definitions came thick and fast in what I later described as “The Light of the Charge Brigade” featured in Inside Revenue Management, September 2008. This time around, we are adapting the Online Charging applications definitions in the Application Framework (TAM) to process definitions...

The boom in smartphone sales and higher data usage is both a blessing and a scourge for mobile operators, and it may be the driver for new billing models to be adopted. The Singapore Straits Times is the latest to pick up on the phenomenon that operators hate to hear about — ‘bill shock’! The reason is simple: somebody (in this case an MP no less), appears ignorant of data charging while roaming. Once the customer is hit with a big bill, all hell breaks loose.  In this case, Ms. Lee Bee Wah chalked...