Starhome Making roaming simpler for prepaid customers
Rating: about time too
By Annie Turner
Starhome, provider of roaming services and converged solutions for network operators, has launched its Prepaid Anywhere solution. Prepaid Anywhere allows mobile operators to offer prepaid customers user-friendly international roaming on any worldwide network, without the hassle of unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) or customised applications for mobile networks enhanced logic (CAMEL) upgrades.
Starhome’s Prepaid Anywhere service has already been short-listed by the 2007 GSMA Awards judging panel for the Best Roaming Product or Service category.
At the moment, prepaid customers cannot use their mobile phones everywhere they travel, mainly due to complications in real-time charging. This means prepaid customers have to resort to other ways to make and receive calls, such as buying local prepaid SIM cards in the visited countries, or using calling cards resulting in lost revenue for both the home and visited network operators.
Prepaid Anywhere allows prepaid customers to make calls and use value added services as they roam, just like postpaid roamers.
Orly Nesher, vice president of marketing at Starhome added, “In the prepaid market, the fragile level of customer loyalty is dependent more on value added services than cost. Operators that can provide easy access to roaming will increase revenue from the prepaid market segment. It will also help them to differentiate themselves from their competitors.”
Well, of course the success of simplified roaming for prepaid customers will depend on how much they are charged for the privilege and how straightforward the tariff is. The trust level between consumers and mobile operators is low to begin with and could fall further if operators don’t charge sensibly.
See http://www.gsmawards.com/nominees.shtml for other short-listed companies in the 3GSM Awards.
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