Meet the 3G billing challenge

摘要

On December 5, 2001 the world's first commercial UMTS network with content based services went live. The proiect on the Isle of Man is a test bed, not iust for technology but also for the market reaction to individual services and pricing schemes. Yet for this to be useful, the billing system had to be up to the challenge. Central to the introduction of 3G was the question of how these different services would be billed. UMTS services promised to introduce complexities in billing that had never before been faced. Yet if the billing issues could not be resolved, it would make commercial success for the technology very difficult to achieve. BT Manx, a wholey-owned subsidiary of BT Wireless (now known as mmO_2) and its partners recognised that additional expertise was required in the design and introduction of the applications required to make customers hungry to use the networks they build. The success of the project would therefore be measured by the acceptance and demand from customers for any new third generation services introduced.