As Wi-Fi grows in popularity and evolves to carry not just data, but also voice and more multimedia content, service providers running these networks face new billing challenges. Those challenges include how to bill for services; how to identify voice versus data sessions; and how to ensure all the information from a session is gathered so all entities involved in providing the service gets their fair share.Today there is a lot of variability in how customers are billed for Wi- Fi network usage, says Mary Malecki, director of marketing at Pronto Networks, which provides OSS/BSS services for large-scale WLANs. Billing is done by time, volume and session, she says. Billing also may vary based on the location, such as a cafe or an airport, she adds. And Wi-Fi service also frequently is priced differently by geographic market.
But public Wi-Fi hotspot operations can move to offer more consistency in billing, Nandu Desai, Pronto's director of product management, says. For example, he suggests that a service provider could work with a particular franchise to offer service with the same rates at all of that franchise's locations across the country.
While helping customers better understand what their Wi-Fi costs will be is certainly a good thing, Lee Huggins, vice president of switch engineering for the Communications Services Group at VeriSign Inc., says service providers need to be careful in moving to new billing models. Wireless data on next-generation cellular and Wi-Fi networks typically are measured and billed for in 'buckets' of kilobits and megabits, Huggins says, but at least one major carrier is starting to charge for wireless data based on time rather than kilobits. That may be because customers easily understand how long they're online, but may have a harder time getting a handle on their data usage, says Huggins of VeriSign, a provider of hosted mediation, rating, billing, roaming and service provisioning for network operators.
But Huggins says moving to a time-based billing model for wireless data services may be a mistake. He explains that as networks get faster, it takes less and less time to get data over those connections, so the service provider charging based on time could end up short-changing itself. Instead of moving to time-based billing, Huggins suggests that wireless service providers educate customers on how to gauge their anticipated data volumes. One way service providers could do this, he says, is by providing customers with a matrix that shows the data loads of various types of network transactions.
Ben Samuel, director of wireless services for billing vendor Intec Telecom Systems, says rating and billing for Wi-Fi is all in day's work for most IP billing systems, but few are cable of controlling access to the network - a function that may be increasingly important as peer-to-peer networks and bandwidth-hogging multimedia applications proliferate. Once a user has exceeded the threshold allowed under his billing plan, providers have the option of charging for the overage, cutting off usage or lowering quality of service so that other users are not impacted. While any IP billing system can charge for overage, restricting access or adjusting QoS requires a networkfacing system. Intec's Dynamic Charging Platform, Samuel says, is one of the few that interfaces with gear like Cisco Systems Inc.'s PCube or ProQuent Systems' BitCapture Mobile Solution that sit on the network stream. These systems interface with DCP to determine usage thresholds and appropriate action - a process dubbed active mediation.
In another example, a user might purchase the ability to throttle on the network 10 times per month in order to download movies or swap large files. Active mediation would be required to manage those units of usage.
In the long term, however, wireless data is likely to evolving to a value-based billing scenario, says Grant Lenahan, vice president and executive director of wireless mobility for Telcordia Technologies Inc. This, he says, will be driven at least in part by the content-based services moving across wireless networks.
But delivering various types of content and applications on wireless networks and making sure the customer receives the proper bill and that all parties involved in the delivery of that information are properly reimbursed is a complex process, says Lenahan.
"There's a hierarchical structure in Wi-Fi that you don't have in other services," says Pronto Network's Malecki, noting that may include wholesale and retail service providers, the franchise operation and the manager of the actual location.
Unlike traditional voice-only networks in which a single switch holds session information in a call detail record, today's IP-based networks are widely distributed, so billing and settlement systems need to collect data from various routers, gateways and other devices on the network to get a complete record of the transaction so they can render a bill. In cases involving third-party content providers, the billing and settlements systems also need to grab data from those sources and figure it into the equation. "So you need to grab things from a lot of places that might not talk to each other," adds Lenahan. "Correlation rules need to be smart enough not to close the record out before all that is done."
Intec's Samuel agrees. "Where people are falling down and where some of the challenges start arising are around how are you going to do revenuesharing, how are you going to set up the partners," he says, pointing to revenue-splitting on the back end and partner Web access requirements on the front end. InterconnecT, Intec's settlements engine was recently augmented to handle data services. It, paired with the Inter-mediatE mediation platform, is Intec's answer to partner management and settlement for Wi-Fi operators. "We can help them create invoices for roaming partners, content providers, venues. This is hot for us right now,' Samuel says.
Another issue related to Wi-Fi and billing that's gaining in importance is how to charge for voice calls, which are expected to be a growing source of traffic on WLANs. However, Chuck Huffman, senior manager of business development and strategy with Syniverse Technologies Inc., says there's no standard way for identifying Wi-Fi voice versus Wi-Fi data sessions. That will be important, he adds, noting that service providers will likely want to charge differently for the two kinds of sessions. Syniverse runs a clearinghouse that does settlements, mostly for voice services, and the company recently launched a Wi-Fi roaming service.
- Additional reporting by Khali Henderson
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