Bell Atlantic Mobile Tests CPP in Delaware

Bell Atlantic Mobile, hoping to gauge how well customers accept calling party pays, tweaked its wireless mediation and billing system to launch a CPP offering in its Delaware test market Nov. 15. The carrier is offering CPP to residential and business customers in the 302 area code; those customers can also receive CPP calls in Philadelphia, its surrounding counties and in southern New Jersey. Outside those areas, customers are treated as regular cellular subscriber and are charged for the incoming call.

Here’s the plan, Sam

The “Call Me” plan is free to wireless subscribers and doesn’t require a special phone number. Customers can also create a “priority list” of five people whose incoming calls they are willing to pay for. The plan comes with caller ID so customers can identify those preferred callers. Calls to the service can originate anywhere in the country.

Here’s how it works:

When a call is placed to the wireless user, an announcer (you guessed it, James Earl Jones) informs the caller what charges the call will incur. The caller can hang up to avoid the charges. A caller who stays on the line pays 25 cents per minute (or 35 cents per minute if using a credit card), plus any usual phone charges such as long-distance and other tolls. If the call comes from a Bell Atlantic landline circuit, the charge will appear on the caller’s phone bill. If not, it will appear on the caller’s credit card. In case a call is dropped in mid-conversation, credit card users will be charged for only the portions of the call that are completed, Bell Atlantic Mobile spokesperson Nancy Stark says. Plan customers will also be listed in Bell Atlantic Mobile’s directory assistance service. This is the first time the company has listed mobile numbers.

Looking for trends

Bell Atlantic Mobile hopes the test will reveal several trends: “We’re trying to see what the general acceptance rate is among new customers, and even though we’re not aiming this at our embedded customers, we’re curious to see how many of those will jump on the bandwagon,” says John DePaola, staff director of product management. “Our thinking has been toward incremental customers; we’re looking for people who aren’t sure about cellular phones, people who are concerned about the cost.”

But Call Me data will be used to measure customer habits. “We are hoping to see if this generates any incremental air time,” DePaola says. “We wanted to get our feet wet and see how it worked and who it worked with, so that we could refine the offering before we launch it generally.” The company won’t have a time frame to launch the service on a larger scale until the Delaware offering is studied, says Bell Atlantic Mobile spokeswoman Nancy Stark. She did not indicate when the test would end.

Prepaid calling cards won’t work

Landline customers can’t use prepaid calling cards to reach CPP customers, Stark says. But credit card calls are accepted. “Calling cards require a different clearinghouse than we presently have,” DePaola says. “We thought it would be simpler to use our current credit card clearinghouse, and debit cards for any of the calls that couldn’t be billed back to a home phone number.”

Altering the wireless billing system to handle CPP took nearly 5 months, including planning, implementation and testing. “The real trickery, if you will, came in the billing system itself,” he says. “The billing system looks at a minute as a minute, whether it’s coming in or going out. We had to be able to identify incoming minutes as CPP calls and remove them from that portion of the rating system to make sure they weren’t billed” to the wireless subscriber.

Tracking call duration

To track call duration, as well as other traffic patterns of the plan’s customers, the billing staff had to create a separate database for CPP call information. “We identify the calls and put them in buckets, so we can come up with a total of what kind of traffic we have, how many calls, how many minutes,” DePaola says.

The calls enter the billing system in the normal manner. “To the network it looks like a plain old call,” he says. “But there is a code running along with this incoming call. … When it comes time for rating and billing that call, the billing system looks for the code, and if it spots it, it takes that record and throws it into the other database and makes believe it never happened. It gave a few people some gray hairs, with all the changes that had to take place.”

AT&T: It’s ‘irrelevant’

AT&T conducted a CPP test in the Minneapolis-St. Paul market that ended in December 1998. The 18-month study separated CPP calls by assigning participants phone numbers with 500 prefixes. About 100 people took part in that project. AT&T has come to the conclusion that most of its wireless customers believe CPP is “irrelevant” because of flat-rate pricing and calling plans that offer buckets of minutes, says Ken Woo, director of communications for AT&T wireless.

According to Bob Roche of the Cellular Telecommunications Industries Association (CTIA), CPP has been offered—as an option—in most major markets, including those of Ameritech, Cincinnati Bell, GTE and U S West Communications. The Federal Communications Commission and industry groups such as the CTIA, however, want CPP to become standard in U.S. markets, as it is in Europe and Latin America.

Legacy billing systems, myriad formats and varying databases make CPP difficult to execute on a grand scale in the United States.

DePaola says that once the pieces were in place, the Delaware launch was relatively easy to implement—after input from about 30 colleagues from marketing, billing, finance and Bell Atlantic’s corporate office had been implemented, that is. “From a technical and programming point of view, it is a doable kind of service. I don’t see why other people won’t or can’t do it. It just takes a lot of extra equipment to manage it.”