TOTAL SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS, INC.
Serving the Telecommunications Industry for over a decade with
Mediation, Settlement and Rating Software

3G CONTENT SETTLEMENT

Content Settlement is emerging as a key business issue for 3G mobile operators as they move to establish new sources of revenue from third-party content providers. Interconnect billing, already an essential business requirement for conventional traffic-based agreements between carriers, is well placed to adapt to a new role as a comprehensive solution for revenue management between operators and third party providers in the 3G content arena.

With the rise of IP-based 3G and GPRS mobile networks, mobile operators are looking to a future when they become more than voice and data carriers, and become primarily providers of value-added services.

Content settlement is effectively a form of wholesale billing with some new twists. Among these is the fact that, while many content providers will charge a fee for the distribution of their content, some (such as advertisers) may be paying for the privilege of accessing the mobile operator's customer base. The importance of advertising in particular is expected to grow as location-based targeting becomes technically feasible on a large scale.

Wholesale billing is already a key issue for telephony operators since interconnect charges frequently account for as much as 50% of operating overheads. Failure to grasp the revenue-earning opportunities of interconnection or to monitor the costs accurately will have serious implications for a company's profit margins. As new technologies emerge and operators begin to explore new business models, interconnect billing is poised to take on even greater significance with a shift away from duration-based voice billing towards content and value-based charging structures.

Regardless of the dominance of voice call billing in previous years, interconnect billing systems can prove to be well equipped to handle the influx of new requirements that will accompany the growth of content settlement. Some of these billing system requirements include:

• Flexible architecture to cope with emerging and as yet unknown business models
• Support for a wide range of revenue sharing models and multi-party accounting through flexible interfaces
• Flexible reference data modeling
• Powerful and extensible rating functionality to support new rating requirements
• Power and scalability to support traffic growth and change
• Real-time capability
• Application Programming Interfaces
• Intuitive user interfaces
• Convergent design compatible with PSTN interconnect models

The features described above should be included in any robust content settlement solution. TSS has the "Total Software Solution" for your content settlement requirements: our products TRECS© and THOR©.

The implementation of THOR© (Total HOt Rater) into your current billing system will remove the burden of data preparation from the billing system, allowing for reduced cost when establishing new service offerings for IP services. Transaction processing includes: duration based, events based, fixed charge, volume based (incoming), volume based (outgoing) and volume based (total). As with all TSS products, THOR© maintains data integrity and security, complies with industry and client standards, and provides data error and deviations reporting.

In addition, TRECS© functionality will provide IP content providers, mobile operators, and billing vendors alike the ability to convert and process external formats within their billing system utilizing existing proprietary formats in a near real time environment. TRECS©, written in Visual Basic and C++, provides carriers with the necessary tools to ensure content settlement occurs at a remarkably low cost and in a near real-time environment.

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