NEW ORLEANS-Boston Communications Group Inc., Woburn, Mass., announced Sept. 23 the availability of its new BCGI Prepaid Connection for wireless carriers serving small and medium-sized markets.
For an upfront investment of about $50,000, these wireless telecommunications providers can install the equipment needed to access this service, E.Y. Snowden, president and chief executive officer said.
“Prepaid Connection is available today. We are in discussions with a few carriers and expect to have announcements of contracts shortly,” he said.
With the new architecture installed, smaller wireless carriers can expect to have to charge their prepaid customers airtime rates that average a maximum of 10 cents per minute, Snowden said. That retail price maximum will drop in proportion to increasing usage volume on the new system, which is scalable to accommodate growth, he added.
“For a small hardware investment collocated on their sites, there will be no requirement for off-premises trunking,” said Gary Eubanks, vice president of domestic sales for BCGI systems division.
That hardware investment is the front end of one of BCGI’s more than 40 nodes nationwide that handle voice trunking to switches for call rating and other prepaid functions. This process can get very pricey for carrier’s whose networks are not situated near one of the nodes, Snowden said.
The node front end connects by a computer server on the carrier’s premises to Boston Communications’ new database site in Tulsa, Okla.
This will handle the back-end functions of the system, eliminating that obligation from the carriers, Eubanks said.
Local area calls will be handled by the new server complex, while roaming calls will go through the main BCGI nodes that operate the company’s national C2C prepaid wireless network, Snowden said.
“We see roaming happening more and more in prepaid,” Snowden said.
“This is more of a priority for small-market carriers, which rely on roaming significantly more than larger carriers for a greater percentage of their revenues.”
Furthermore, Prepaid Connection also will significantly lower the barriers to entry that smaller carriers will otherwise face as prepaid services enter the next generation of Wireless Intelligent Networks, he said.
“Boston Communications is ready to serve all customers with WIN,” he added.
Today, less than 3 percent of the estimated 2.4 million prepaid subscribers in the United States are customers of carriers in small and medium-sized markets. Boston Communications believes the lack of available prepaid systems that are cost-effective is the cause of their under-representation in this niche, Snowden said.
The Yankee Group, Boston, projects domestic prepaid wireless customers to grow to 15.6 million in 2001, he said. BCGI hopes it will be a catalyst for customers in smaller markets to become a larger percentage of that larger total, Snowden said.
