Prepaid Telecommunications: A Vendor Perspective

By Obembe Olutola M

Telecommunication is the transmission of messages (voice, sms, video, audio e.t.c), over significant distances, for the purpose of communication. With todays mobile communication, The GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) standard has dominated the affairs of mobile telephony and with numerous operators worldwide and vendors, Its safe to say Mobile is a world of its own.

Early GSM Architectures concentrated on the access and control layer of mobile technology with connections with Fixed like PSTN but today the Application/Service Layer is increasing and its taking the new turn in business and service provisioning to both the mobile end-users and mobile operators. Least to say the present market sells on services, applications and medias.

Prepaid services refers to services paid for in advance and one key advantage of this is because they allow customers to monitor and budget usage in advance. This is evident is todays mobile operators offerings with recharge cards at specified amounts where customers charge there phone when they want to and use the service when they want to and are not pressured by contracts or bills. Prepaid has seriously changed the face of mobile billing and payment and in a lot of countries, It is just the way to go for many mobile customers.

However for the Mobile operators and Vendors, where does a Model like Prepaid billing come in? Previously, Operators purchase their equipment first hand, Install, source for competence and then hit the market. This of course is a serious money spending exercise and it made telecommunications a business for the big money spenders. Today, The business approach is changing a bit, Some vendors like Huawei offer some sort of post billing scheme on equipments, they install and configure the equipments without firsthand payment and let you use the products for a specified period of time before payment is initiated, afterwards support and post-payment services follow. In a financial world where every investor is thinking “savings”, it looks like a way to go but issues like Quality, Trust, Contracts and Competence comes to play in this.


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Vendors/Provider (Few) – > Mobile Operators (Many) – > End Users (Numerous) but essentially what this future holds out is flexibility, Choice, and Simplicity.