DALLAS-Alltel Corp. said it selected National Telemanagement Corp.'s SmartPay billing system for its prepaid wireless product in all 174 Alltel markets."SmartPay is a simple to use billing solution that works with any standard handset," said Bill Seelie, vice president of sales for NTC. "And...
NEW YORK-Wireless carriers can only imagine scaling back their costly call-flooded customer support centers and slashing the overhead that comes with them. And wireless users long to regain those wasted afternoons on hold with a receiver glued to their ears only to find they've...
SINGAPORE-After two years of bad debts and line terminations, wireless operators in the economically worst-hit Asian nations of Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia can finally look forward to better times ahead.Analysts say economic recovery combined with the growing acceptance of prepaid will help...
ATLANTA-Satyam Enterprises Ltd., a regional partner of LHS Group Inc., said Global System for Mobile communications operator Fascel Ltd. in Gujarat, India, selected LHS' client/server-based customer-care and billing system, BSCS, to support its wireless service.Satyam Enterprises will provide customer-care and billing services for more...
WASHINGTON-The Federal Communications Commission will ask a federal appeals court to review its decision that eliminated FCC rules on how telecommunications carriers use information about their customers.The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit Aug. 18 ruled 2-1 that one aspect of the...
NEW YORK-Bell Atlantic Corp. said Sept.1 it will merge its Carrier Services and Telecom Industry Services groups to enhance the level of service to other telecommunications carriers and improve efficiency.Carrier Services provides access billing services to other telecommunications carriers, and TIS serves wireless carriers,...
Telecommunications operators could benefit from embracing fixed mobile convergence, according to a new report released by Ovum, an independent research and consulting company.The convergence market is expected to reach $35 billion by 2005, up from $2 billion this year, said the report, "Fixed Mobile...
WASHINGTON-A federal appeals court has thrown out recently changed rules on how telecommunications carriers use information about their customers.The court issued the ruling as the wireless industry celebrated the Federal Communications Commission's decision to relax some of its rules regarding how carriers use information...
NEW YORK-World Access Inc., Atlanta, announced Aug. 17 it would acquire FaciliCom International Inc., Washington, D.C., by paying FaciliCom's shareholders about $436 million and assuming $300 million in FaciliCom debt.World Access, a publicly traded company, terminates international long-distance voice and data traffic in at...
SAN FRANCISCO-Just In Time Solutions, a San Francisco provider of Internet billing and interactive customer-care software, said earlier this month it had raised $10 million in a second round of private equity financing, bringing its total outside investment to $15 million.The company's modular BillCast...
NEW YORK-It was just this year that the camel's nose of wireless intelligent networks appeared under the mobile communications' tent, and it is not expected to rise to its full height until the dawn of the new millennium in 2001.A creature of technology to...
Financial analysts continued their wait-and-see attitude toward Paging Network Inc. as the company released second-quarter earnings.In contrast, Arch Communications Group Inc. completed its merger with MobileMedia Corp. in the second quarter, resulting in one of the lowest debt ratios in the industry and the...
Spotcast Communications Inc., Silver Spring, Md., is billing itself as the world's first provider of localized, advertisement-sponsored mobile communications.The company recently completed a beta test with its first carrier customer, Peoples Telephone Co.. The Hong Kong-based Global System for Mobile communications 1800 provider has...
MCLEAN, Va.-Nineteen network service providers and telecommunications companies, including Amdocs, Andersen Consulting, Convergys Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., Portal Software and Sun Microsystems Inc., have formed a working group to develop a new key Internet usage billing standard.The standard to be developed-called the Internet Protocol Detail...
CINCINNATI-Convergys Corp. said it entered into and outsourcing agreement with Ameritech Mobile Communications Inc. to provide a complete suite of customer care and billing solutions to Ameritech through Sept. 30, 2004.The services include customer acquisition and service, provisioning, bill preparation, ad hoc reporting and...
NEW YORK-Since the launch of carrier competition in the duopoly wireless market, third-party distributors have had to work hard to manage increasingly complex distribution issues. Carriers, meanwhile, are dealing with this same level of complexity-trying to improve sales processes for existing distribution channels while...
WASHINGTON-The telecommunications industry has come out against the Federal Communications Commission's proposal to impose truth-in-billing rules on commercial mobile radio service carriers.Additionally, both long-distance carriers and local exchange carriers oppose certain aspects of the truth-in-billing requirements.The CMRS industry is so competitive that misleading bills...
BOULDER, Colo.-SignalSoft Corp., a software developer focused on the wireless location market, found high consumer demand for wireless location services in two market research studies the company conducted.The studies were designed to determine consumer attitudes about location-based services.The first survey, conducted with The Strategis...
Alltel Corp. said it signed an integration agreement with Intecom Systems under which Alltel Information Systems will fully integrate Intecom's applications into its customer-care and billing system to provide converged billing, complete billing analysis and full multimedia reporting functionality to the customers of communications...
MURRAY HILL, N.J.-Savera Systems Inc. said Tango, the Global System for Mobile communications provider in Luxembourg, is incorporating the Savera RealTime Prepaid Billing system into its Pronto prepaid wireless service offering.The Savera RealTime Prepaid Billing system is a client/server-based prepaid billing platform with real-time...
NEW YORK-Heading into a scorcher of an Independence Day holiday, American stock markets closed in record-setting territory, thereby heating up the prospects for wireless sector companies seeking financing during the second half of 1999.By now it is a cliche to say that Alan Greenspan,...
As the paging industry continues its transformation to narrowband personal communications services and engages in high-level consolidation, some have questioned the fate of the smaller, mom-and-pop paging carriers.In an industry expected to be dominated by two or three national players, where do the small,...
CHICAGO-U.S. Cellular announced the national rollout of BillTracker, an electronic billing solution that provides multi-service line and multi-account business customers with immediate access to monthly billing information, and enables them to track wireless service usage and expenses across multiple departments and users.BillTracker also provides...
Primal Systems Inc., a provider of customer management products, introduced a new product to its suite of e-business solutions, called WebCare, last week at Billing '99 in Dallas.Designed to help carriers maximize the use of the Internet for customer-care functions, WebCare allows customers and...
