The dawn of the bundled pricing plan did not end the need for creativity in addressing wireless subscriber needs. In the rush to embrace bundled plans, wireless network operators risk losing sight of the needs of their subscribers as well as miss opportunities to gain new customers. Bundled plans are attractive to only the limited percentage of subscribers willing to spend $60 or more each month to rack up a lot of minutes. In fact, customers who spend at that level make up only 8 percent of an operator’s subscriber base.
Many wireline subscribers don’t consider a mobile phone a necessity. They are further put off by complicated pricing structures and rates that reach 50 cents per minute for sporadic use. Because of these perceptions, wireline still accounts for 95 to 98 percent of the total voice minutes. Why shouldn’t wireless carriers compete for this market, rather than compete against all of the other wireless carriers for 5 percent of the mobile pie?
Average revenue per phone unit (ARPU) will continue to decline as medium- and low-use subscribers move to wireless service. To successfully compete for these new subscribers, network operators can offer entry-level “bucket” plans, or be more creative in tailoring their services. One approach is to use subscriber location when creating product offerings. Today, several products let operators use location as a basis for billing, but most add only incremental capability into the switch or billing system, and ignore the need for provisioning interfaces with enough flexibility to allot each subscriber a unique billing zone.
Why Location Is Valuable
Location makes sense, not just for the “glove box” segment, but also for the population that has not yet switched to wireless. In an ideal offering, subscribers would be offered rates nearly equal to wireline rates where there is a competitor with a landline substitute, and higher rates where there is no landline substitute. In fact, bucket-based plans could be offered as a complement to the location-based rates that would reward power users. Traditional rating factors can be used to estimate when subscribers are at home, such as peak vs. off-peak usage or day of the week, but why not add location as a rating factor? Subscribers would have a phone that could be a second line at home, pay competitive landline rates, and have the flexibility to use the same phone and telephone number for their mobile unit.
Existing Solutions for Location-based Services
Wireless carriers that want to make location part of their product offerings have four architecture types-based on the billing system, the switch, customer premise equipment, or an intelligent network. Support for billing and customer care integration is vital if a wireless operator wants to provision and maintain personalized rate zones for its entire subscriber base. Evaluating the merits of these solutions should focus not only on call processing capability, but also on billing and customer care attributes. But offering such personalized service is a tall order. Can the architecture support thousands of individualized rate zones? How easy is it to maintain the subscriber rate zone data? Can the product evolve to provide enhanced services to customers? Does the system allow the wireless operator to provide other location-based services?
Billing system-based solutions provide location capability in a post call-processing framework. The wireless network operator associates a subset of cells with a billing zone within the billing system. Customer service representatives (CSRs) then assign subscribers to the billing zone. When a subscriber makes a call, the switch formats the call detail record (CDR) with the cell identifier servicing the call and sends the record to the billing system. During the rating process, the billing system interprets the cell identifier and determines whether the subscriber was in his or her zone when making the call. The billing system then applies the appropriate rate. This approach has the advantage of not forcing a lot of change into the wireless operator’s customer care, billing or network systems. It also works well in a heterogeneous switch environment, and subscribers don’t have to buy a special handset to get the service. The trick is figuring out to which billing zone the subscriber should be assigned.
Switch-based solutions use a similar approach, although the zone determination takes place during the call. The wireless operator associates a subset of cells with a billing zone, which is stored in the switch. CSRs then assign subscribers to that zone, and those assignments are also provisioned in the switch. When a subscriber makes a phone call, the switch determines whether the cell identifier servicing the call is assigned to the subscriber’s billing zone. The result is formatted into the CDR and sent to the carrier’s billing system. This architecture enables some additional capabilities that aren’t possible with a billing system-based architecture. Subscribers can be notified whether they are in their zone when they make or receive phone calls. The switch can also determine whether subscribers are moving out of their zones during calls, apply a “split rate” to the calls, and notify subscribers (via tones) of the change in billing rate. And, again, subscribers don’t have to buy a special handset to get this service.
Customer premise equipment (CPE)-based architecture, also known as fixed wireless, consist of installing hardware at the customer’s home. Although CPE can take a number of different forms, it often resembles a cordless phone. The receiver in the house is hooked up to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). The handset utilizes a designated frequency when a subscriber is at home and switches to the normal cellular frequencies when the subscriber moves out of the home zone. Home zone calls are routed through the landline connections, and out-of-zone calls through the cellular network. This architecture guarantees good home coverage but also precludes a handoff from the home zone to outside zones. The subscriber, for instance, can talk on his phone while sitting in the car in the driveway, but can’t stay on that call while driving to work. This solution may make sense for wireless network operators who have a sister landline division, but others can’t collect any revenue from the home zone usage. Other residential architectures consist of a transmitter in the house that routes home zone calls to an overlay network dedicated to the home transmitters. Some of these have enough bandwidth to support multiple phone lines or data connections. Again, these systems don’t let the hand a call off into the public cellular network. Deploying this kind of system would require a wireless network operator to develop or outsource an expansive installation and maintenance program.
The aforementioned methods have other disadvantages, too. For instance, if the goal is to provide unique billing zones to all subscribers, then subscriber data must be stored in a central location. For the switch-based solutions, it is not architecturally sound to make the switch store customer data on this scale. From the perspective of maintaining subscriber zone data, switch-based and billing system-based architectures are unattractive for migrating to individualized zone service. By defining billing zones in terms of cell identifiers, they create a requirement to update subscriber data whenever a change to the cellular network is implemented. Some fairly sophisticated functions would have to be developed to identify which subscriber zones are affected when the coverage of a cell site is changed or a new cell site is constructed.
The billing system and switch-based solutions also cannot easily move beyond cell ID for deducing whether subscribers are in or out of their rate zones. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) mandate for Phase 2 W-911 requires wireless network operators to provide a subscriber location within 125 meters, which necessitates location-finding technology (LFT). To meet the mandate, wireless network operators will most likely deploy a range of these technologies, including Global Positioning System (GPS)-enabled handsets and triangulation-based techniques. Enhancing the billing system and switch-based solutions to take advantage of better sources of location data would require essentially an overhaul of their existing functionality. Even if this could be accomplished, it is unclear whether the functionality to interface with and interpret the LFT data belongs in the switch or billing systems.
Operators of billing- and switch-based systems have implemented location capability only incrementally; they do not claim to support individual billing zones for a massive subscriber base. Rather, they represent a compromise, which enables a wireless operator to provide a limited number of zones within its network and then allow subscribers to share the zones. This mitigates the provisioning and maintenance issues discussed above. The CPE-based solutions complicate the deployment of a location-based billing service by requiring customers to acquire new equipment and the wireless operator to invest in a maintenance group to install and maintain the CPE. All of the solutions limit the wireless operator’s ability to use location creatively.
Intelligent Network-based Solution
Overcoming these problems requires an alternative architecture, such as intelligent network architecture, which best supports location-based services. In moving the location-based applications to an IN platform, the service provider removes the customer database role from the switch and lets it to do what it does best--process calls. The service control points (SCPs) are designed to act as a centralized resource for accessing customer data and hosting applications. In the case of location-based billing applications, an SCP-based application could tell the switch whether a subscriber is in or out of zone. The mechanism for supporting this interaction already exists by using IS-41 trigger messages that the switch sends to the IN-based application.
Another advantage to basing location services in the IN is that it becomes easier to move beyond using cell ID as the only source of location. Once location technology is deployed in the network, a new resource is needed to interface with this technology and provide location information to applications that use location information to control the call. In the IS-41 world, this resource is known as the mobile positioning center; in the GSM community, it is known as the mobile location center. Both can simply request a location and determine whether subscribers are in their rate zone.
Yet another advantage of placing location services into the IN is that the services can work with multiple switches and do not require a single vendor’s switch platform.
Adding Location to Other Offerings
Strategically, an IN-based architecture for supporting location-based applications makes sense. All of the solutions discussed above focus on billing, but many other services could use location to better meet subscriber needs. A service could be offered that gives a wireless subscriber unlimited use of a phone at home but has dialing restrictions out of zone. Location information could also be integrated with other IN-based services such as prepaid or abbreviated dialing services. For example, a subscriber would not be subject to a prepaid limit until leaving his or her zone. Because of complexity and high cost, these combinations are not appealing to small- to medium-sized companies. An IN-based approach lets a wireless carrier offer its small- and medium-sized business customers big business services.
The same architecture that supports these services makes other location-based services, such as call routing, possible. There are other benefits, too. Location data can reduce airtime with 411 operators, who learn the caller’s location as soon as the call is initiated. Ditto with wireless 911, because emergency calls can be routed to the appropriate emergency answering point, along with a callback number and location information updates to the emergency operator throughout the 911 call. As wireless data devices become more prevalent, data applications that enable location context become more attractive. A personal data assistant (PDA) concierge application, for instance, lets travelers download restaurant, hotel and entertainment information to their PDA when they enter a new city. The PDA can be tailored to match the user’s personal profile and the area from which they are calling.
All of these applications enable a carrier to attract customers with new products as well as increase profit in the process. It would be impossible however, to offer this portfolio of services without using an IN-based architecture. Further more, IN makes it easier to add and deploy new services.
Provisioning Architecture
The definition of a subscriber’s rate zone needs to be uncoupled from the cell IDs that cover the subscriber’s zone when using this architecture for billing-specific applications. The rate zone needs to be defined in geographic terms, such as latitude, longitude and coverage radius. If this can be accomplished, billing and customer care systems will no longer have to update subscriber data every time a new cell site is built or coverage of an existing site is changed. Geographic information systems (GIS) technology can provide a flexible provisioning and call processing capability. GIS technology performs several functions, such as polygon intersections (e.g., does a cell sector overlap with a rate zone?), calculation of distance between points, and conversion of a location description to geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude). It also lets network operators view data graphically. For example, the cell coverage information, such as subscriber rate zones, can be displayed over a street or terrain map of the area.
Many service providers may think, “Oh, great-my service reps would have to learn another application, and I’ll have to deploy more hardware to their desktops!” But because the GIS application is wrapped in an open architecture, a wireless operator can ship transactions from the existing customer care system into the GIS application through a browser-based interface. The open architecture is also suited to allow subscribers to access their own service information through an Internet connection. For example, corporate customers could assign or de-assign their mobile identification numbers to their corporate zones themselves via the web.
The architecture provides scalability to handle increased provisioning and inquiry transactions and the flexibility to add or change the kinds of transactions that CSRs process. One does not want to receive a change request from a customer and have to say, “Sure, we can do that-but it will take one to two years to get it in a release, and it will cost a lot of money.”
Remaining Hurdles
The hurdles for implementing location-based services in the IN platform center on getting the standards to catch up with the vision. Until recently, the IN network was used to support service portability for roaming subscribers. Other services that expand a network’s capabilities are moving to intelligent networks, such as authentication, prepaid and virtual private network services. And now, location-based services are entering the picture.
To support IN-based services, there must be a vehicle for allowing the services to interact with the switch for call origin, termination, and mid-call control. In the case of prepaid and location-based services, it would also be nice to be able to interrupt the call to let subscribers know they are reaching the end of their prepaid limit or moving out of their rate zone.
Further, the switch should be able to provide billing information to support location-based calling plans. Currently, IS-41 standards define subscriber-based call origination triggers to which an IN based application can respond. This leaves out the call termination, mid-call, and call disconnection triggers that are required to support other location-based and prepaid services.
For prepaid and location-based billing applications, it would also be useful to have a call disconnect trigger so that the system will know when the call ends. Prepaid billing systems need to know when to stop running the meter on the call and location-based billing operators must know when to stop monitoring the subscribers’ location as they move around or between rate zones.
Benefits of Location-based Services
Introducing location services into the market is daunting, but possible. An IN-based solution coupled with GIS architecture providing location-based services will probably give a wireless carrier the most flexibility to service its customers. Subscribers are the ultimate beneficiaries, because they get a wider variety of services. For the wireless network operators that embrace location-based billing and adopt the best enabling architecture, the benefits translate into increased revenue. And what network operator doesn’t want that?
Drew Esson is the product manager for SignalSoft Corp. in Boulder, Colo. He can be reached at desson@signalsoftcorp.com.
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