Vodafone Malta on track to boost ARPU by eliminating Bill Shock

Single convergent solution protects prepaid and postpaid data service users in real-time. Subscribers can often be reluctant to use mobile data services if they are concerned about their cost. Effective online Bill Shock Prevention is helping to boost ARPU for Vodafone Malta and improving its customers’ experience of data services.

"Vodafone Malta is committed to perform at the highest level, so when we embarked on a very highly demanding project with tight deadlines we wanted to work with a team that would support us all the way through. It was reassuring to have Nokia Siemens Networks’ developers supporting us and answering any questions we might have had."

Marco Incorvaja,
Billing and Data Warehouse
Manager at Vodafone Malta.

The size of Vodafone Malta’s communications market may be modest by global standards, but the island’s number one mobile broadband provider has ambitious plans to grow its business. The company already counts more than 50 percent of the population among its 240,000-strong subscriber base, so there’s a strong incentive to drive up ARPU among existing customers.

Vodafone Malta is aware of the fast pace of today’s world and with this aim in mind it wanted to facilitate customer’s use of mobile data services while roaming. To reassure its customers that they are given a service which truly gives value for money Vodafone was determined to introduce a more transparent billing process. The resulting decision to implement a Bill Shock Prevention (BSP) solution also helped the company comply with new European Union legislation governing roaming charges.

Challenges

  • To achieve ambitious business growth targets by removing barriers to increased take up of mobile data services
  • To comply with EU bill shock prevention regulations effective March 2010
  • To adopt a system flexible enough to enable new services and to meet future regulations as they arise

Scalable with low costs
Based on the Nokia Siemens Networks charge@once mediate platform, the new BSP solution is fully convergent to prevent bill shock for both prepaid and postpaid subscribers. What’s more, the solution works in real-time to alert any customers via SMS when they are reaching a pre-set spending limit for mobile data.

The platform is fully scalable making it well suited to the needs of large CSPs, as well as smaller ones like Vodafone Malta. It is based on commercial off-the-shelf hardware to help lower capital costs and to enable fast deployment. Being fully convergent, the solution enables Vodafone to manage only one database, further contributing to lower CAPEX and OPEX.

Solution

  • An online Bill Shock Prevention (BSP) solution based on Nokia Siemens Networks charge@once mediate platform
  • The scalable solution fits any size of service provider
  • The hardware-independent system uses off-the-shelf servers

The BSP solution calculates the cost of the data roaming session and compares it with the individual user’s pre-set threshold. It then uses SMS to notify users as they approach their spending limit, and terminates the session once the threshold has been reached.

Fast deployment to meet
regulationVodafone Malta wanted to provide its roaming customers the best possible service whilst complying with EU legislation, which became effective in

March 2010. Nokia Siemens Networks used its system integration expertise to assure that the BSP solution was up and running in just three months.

Benefits

  • Fast deployment met EU regulation deadline on time
  • User’s control over charges stimulates mobile data usage
  • The converged solution supports both prepaid and postpaid subscribers
  • Flexible mediation can extend BSP functions to non-roaming subscribers in the future and re-uses existing infrastructure to maximize cost efficiency

“All through the project the local Nokia Siemens Networks Team supported us whenever queries arose. Any issues we encountered were immediately addressed by them,” says Marco Incorvaja, Billing and Data Warehouse Manager at Vodafone Malta.

Notably, the charge@once mediate platform can evolve to deliver a range of other advanced services in the future. For instance, Vodafone may extend the notification service to encourage increased spending on mobile data among the users of its local, domestic network.

The solution will enable Vodafone to boost ARPU and to prevent churn by providing users with protection from Bill Shock and thus an improved customer experience.