And more to the point, how can we help you with your technology concerns? I’m genuinely pleased to be joining The Prepaid Press, and I look forward to receiving and responding to your questions, concerns, industry rants, etc. We’ll be focusing on the technology that enables prepaid applications and I’ll be working with some of the industry’s top minds to get the answers you need, delivered via this column. As the VP of Product Management and Marketing with Pactolus, I’ve spent the last 6 years or so listening to service providers and network operators, and helping them to shape the business models, service applications and architectures behind some of our industry’s most profitable services. We’re in an exciting time. The high entry point costs and rigid services of TDM are rapidly giving way to the industry’s migration to IP services. Whether you’re taking a “cap and grow” approach, doing a full IP migration, entering the market economically via SIP trunking, or even wondering if you can stay put on your legacy infrastructure for a few more cycles, the fact is that you’re competing head to head with smart, hungry competitors, so buckle up. We’re here to help sort through the issues you’re facing. Are you feeling pressured to lower service rates or institute new ease of use features? Maybe you’re now in the process of extending your company’s network interconnects and IP services POPs to support multiple service usage per subscriber account (some maybe even in other countries). Or, maybe you’re mulling introducing new web integration, and doing what-ifs to figure out the potential margin impact, up or down. You might even be working through a billing integration, currency conversion or subscriber policy issue. Let us help. For this first column, we’ll take a brief look at the economics and requirements for those service providers just now getting started. Even if you are underway, you may find some of these ideas helpful. Economically entering the market For the first time, new and potential prepaid service providers can enter the market and economically expand by taking advantage of the increasingly-pervasive IP infrastructure and the Service Initiation Protocol (SIP) services ecosystem. IP supports long term service provider opportunities and business model flexibility that were inconceivable only a year or two ago with traditional TDM networks. IP’s Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is basically rewriting the economics of prepaid services. SIP technologies have scaled and matured so much over the last few years that it now takes only nominal investments to enter the market with a solution that provides the maturity, service density and scale to run a business. For example, today, a single 1RU Linux box can typically support around 5 million minutes of prepaid a month. SIP Peering with a wholesale service provider eliminates the need for expensive TDM facilities, since service providers can leverage SIP peering to connect 800 numbers for inbound service access and place long distance calls to PSTN numbers. What’s SIP Trunking? Large carriers such as XO, InterRoute and Level 3 are providing wholesale IP voice services via SIP-enabled components, providing key functions such as local access number and IP to PSTN calling. SIP trunking provides comprehensive PSTN interconnection and service interworking, so that Prepaid Service Providers (PSP) can economically enter the market without pricy TDM-based switches or IP to PSTN media gateways. IP-based service delivery architectures are based on open communications protocols: SIP, MGCP, Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) and commercially available computer systems, databases, with web servers, and the service application runs on an application server. This approach supports ongoing scale of call capacity, and integration of service innovations and features. SIP-based service delivery platform vendors recognize that SIP Trunking substantially broadens their addressable base of service providers and subscribers, and are aggressively developing and introducing both comprehensive services suites and self-contained single service modules. Both have attractive entry cost points, especially when compared with either TDM networks or first generation IP service infrastructures. And both the SIP services suites and stand-alone services support incremental expansion and evolution of the service provider’s business model. This approach requires only a narrow fraction of the investments needed for first gen IP media gateways and softswitches. And it’s light years ahead of TDM-based Class 5 switches, carrier-owned behemoths that couldn’t be easily or cost effectively upgraded, wouldn’t scale and required independent service providers to build expensive overlay networks. Today, the architecture readily supports the extension of services to incorporate subscriber features, business practices, extend your service interconnects and expand geographic reach. It also helps ‘future proof’ the prepaid provider’s business model, because it lets them easily re-shape and reconfigure services to accommodate the unexpected: emergency call rerouting, sustaining subscriber access should network capacities drop, and it also future proofs PSPs by ensuring their readiness for the next prepaid service revolution/evolution: IMS. IMS: The Road Just Ahead for Prepaid Service Providers The wireless world shows us what’s ahead for everyone, wireless and wireline. 3G networks have melded rudimentary wireless IP handsets and very high speed wireless networks, and have fueled subscriber expectations and given us all a look at where services can go. IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) interfaces are about to enter the scene, promising “any to any” service delivery that unifies heretofore fragmented subscriber populations and service plans. IMS is expected to substantially evolve today’s prepaid services to support new types of content such as video messaging, gaming, and other advanced multimedia capabilities. Want to know more? We take requests, so write to us. We’ll pique your curiosity and answer your questions about IMS, service creation/service delivery platforms, policy enforcement, high availability. Prepaid is a rich opportunity, and our success lies in making you successful. So how can we help? What’s your question? Write to Ken Osowski at keno@pactolus.com.