Bill Shock Prevention: Promises and Reality

I has a number of posts about mobile operators, regulators and industry organizations announcing their plans to implement bill shock prevention tools (see "24 Operator Groups (4B Subscribers) to Adopt Bill Shock Prevention Measures This Year (2012)" - here; "Latam MNOs to Implement Bill Shock Prevention by H1 2013" - here, "Australia - Bill Shock Prevention Self-Regulation is Coming" - here; "Bill Shock Prevention is Coming to the US Mobile Service" - here and "EU Helps Preventing Mobile Bill Shock" - here.

And the reality?

A survey conducted by MACH (see "MACH Launches a Cloud-based Bill Shock Prevention Solution" - here) shows that the ".. majority of mobile operators (62%) have not yet implemented any form of bill-shock prevention to protect their customers against unexpectedly high data roaming bills. Furthermore, only 24% of mobile operators worldwide have a solution that can monitor subscriber data usage habits in real-time, thus complying with the GSMA Data Roaming Transparency Initiative launched last year. Such solutions, that consider the subscribers’ data roaming experience first and foremost, boost uptake of data roaming services, leading to more revenue for operators and increased customer satisfaction".

Nevertheless, I also covered several deployments of bill shock prevention by Telefonica, Zain Jordan, Orange Africa, Belgacom and Telekom Austria.

See "Mobile Operators Slow To Protect Consumers From Bill-Shock, Says MACH" - here.

MACH Launches a Cloud-based Bill Shock Prevention Solution

 

Bill Shock Prevention is getting traction recently, as regulation is everywhere (US, EU, Globally). It make sense to see more and more vendor announcements in this space, this time a "Cloud based" one.

MACH, announced the launch of its "..new Bill Shock Prevention solution designed to increase consumer confidence in data roaming .. Despite the rapid growth in domestic data consumption, the vast majority of consumers – 58 per cent according to recent research MACH conducted with YouGov – continue to switch off 3G connectivity when travelling abroad due to fear of bill shock".

"Part of MACH’s M Serve cloud-based portfolio of fast-to-market mobile data monetization services, Bill Shock Prevention monitors subscriber data roaming usage in real-time and provides immediate alerts. Operators can pre-define usage thresholds that then trigger alerts to the operator and send SMS notifications to subscribers. End-users are also able to query data usage when roaming through SMS to gain real-time insight into their current usage levels. In certain cases, operators can block data traffic when consumption reaches particularly high-levels, thereby avoiding the risk of bad debt".

See "MACH Offers Operators an End to Bill Shock" - here.

FCC Follows Europe With Bill Shock Prevention - Vendor Offering Review

  

On March 1st the EU "Bill Shock prevention" program became effective in Europe (see "EU Helps Preventing Mobile Bill Shock" - here).

The European program requires mobile operators to allow subscribers to  limit on their data charges with a default of €50, and get a warning when 80% of the limit has been reached. This mainly applies for using data services while roaming. Sending notification could be a tricky thing - for example if sent by SMS to a device that may not support SMS and/or Email (e.g. iPad, Kindle).

Now, the FCC "seek to gather information on the feasibility of instituting usage alerts and cut-off mechanisms similar to those required under the EU regulations that would provide wireless voice, text, and data consumers in the United States" (here). Note that the FCC also target non-data services. See video below.

Nevertheless, since the FCC thinks that the EU concept is a good one, it was no surprice to see Canadian Bridgewater Systems  quick to respond - as they already implemented such systems in Europe (see the above linked post).

In a press release issued yesterday "Bridgewater Comments on FCC Consultation on Mobile Bill Shock"- here - they present their policy management solutions as capable of implementing the FCC goals.

Since regulation in Europe (and probably soon in the US) require operator to support Bill Shock Prevention, most policy-server vendors offer it (list follows), based on their policy server/PCRF products. While this is not a revenue-generation opportunity for the operators, the requirement sets the ground for implementing policy servers, making it easier to the vendors up-sell additional other solutions and functions. These solutions may include tiered services, usage-based billing, traffic management, Value-added Services management, DPI control and more.

• Camiant (now Tekelec) - Quota and EU Data Roaming Control
• Comptel - Finnish Operator DNA Implements Comptel Policy Control to Combat Bill Shock (customer win)
• FTS-Soft - Bill Shock Prevention
• HP - HP Bill Shock Prevention
• MACH - Bill Shock Prevention
• NSN - Bill shock prevention
• Openet - Openet Enables mobilkom austria to Meet EU Data Roaming Regulations (customer win)
• Openwave - A Cure for Bill Shock
• Volubill  - Bill Shock Management