How to police a revenue share agreement

Rating: Actix has the right tools for Apple, apparently

By Tony Dennis

It’s one thing for Apple to strike revenue sharing agreements. And, if you believe the reports, Vodafone’s considering doing the same thing too. But who’s actually going to police such an agreement?
The answer could well be British software house, Actix.
The company’s new CEO, Alex Hawker, was trying to chat to us about its latest offering on the network optimisation front - Insight.
What’s the point of generating publicity for that when nine out of ten 3G operators already use Actix’ software?
Far more interesting was the levels to which they could drill down through collected data.

It turns out that if a network operator wants to collect the information, Actix can inform them of not only what handsets were in a particular site but what content a specific handset user was viewing at the time.
Plus, of course, the make and model of the handset.
So, if you wanted to prove to a business partner that you were genuinely handing over 42 per cent of all collected revenues, then it looks like Actix has the tools for you.
Did I say 42 per cent? Well, a colleague of mine reckons that was the deal struck by a certain UK operator which is Spanish run. But he hasn’t published the rumour yet, so I can’t be more specific.

The implications of being able to identify subscriber behaviour are, of course, enormous. You could plan to ensure that sufficient data coverage is available at a specific time and date.
Actix has apparently done this for a small mining town in the middle of Australia where they all whip their phones out on Fridays to see if they’ve won the national lottery.

Another anecdote that I particularly liked was about a network operator in Taiwan. The network actually caters for rush hour traffic by angling antennae automatically. In the morning they point into town and in the afternoon they move electrically to point out of town. Very clever.

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