CUSTOMER TESTIMONIAL: 3 Australia
3 Australia Looks to Kabira® for its Solution to Enable
Prepaid Mobile Broadband and Prepaid Internet Access
The combination of Kabira Charging™ software and the Cisco® Content Services Gateway supports innovative new prepaid mobile web and mobile broadband services.
In 2008, 3 Australia launched a variety of new prepaid mobile internet and prepaid mobile broadband services. Key to their successful implementation was a Kabira-based real-time billing solution that gives the company and its customers accurate charging and billing information.
The goal of the prepaid data project was to provide real-time pricing for 3 Australia's telecommunications services using various models including volume, duration, and subscription level among other criteria. Implementing a real-time billing solution created several challenges. All of the relevant billing and rating, subscriber profile and service aware components existed in several different systems spread across the company's network and IT systems. The prepaid internet service required these different data sources and the billing and rating system to be integrated with the Cisco service-aware GPRS network elements.
After reviewing several options, the Kabira solution was selected to provide the real-time billing mediation component for this project. This solution integrated Cisco's Content Services Gateway with the Intec real-time billing and rating engines used by 3 in Australia.
"3 Australia now has the ability to deliver to its prepaid customers, high-quality mobile internet services that have real-time capabilities and highly-personalized and granular policy management, coupled with charging models based on fine-grained service and subscriber profile data," said Chris Clabaugh, vice president of business development at Kabira. "Kabira's Charging software and the Cisco Content Services Gateway™ (CSG2), based on Cisco's high performance Service Application Module for IP (SAMI) technology, provide 3 Australia with a high-speed event-processing and revenue capture platform in combination with a host of service control and billing functions."
3 is now benefiting from a high-performing software platform that directly and easily integrates billing with the core network. The Kabira technology executes events in real-time and caches key data for real-time transactions that include confirmation of credit worthiness. The technology also facilitates virtual billing and rating to ensure accurate revenue capture and real-time prepaid service billing.
At the core of the Kabira solution is how it applies a network application integration (NAI) layer between the network and the IT systems. This reconciles the high-reliability, speed and other characteristics associated with the network, with the flexibility and open-industry standards associated with IT. As a result, the Kabira NAI has enabled 3 Australia to integrate all of the critical components relevant to the prepaid service. The richer functionality of the Kabira NAI facilitates the cost-effective and swift development of new services with its support for an open source service creation environment.
"By bringing these technology platforms together, Kabira Charging, Cisco CSG2 and Oracle Times Ten, we, with our technology partners have created a truly innovative platform. This platform has allowed us to share real-time data usage with our customers delivering a high level of service for 3's customers," said Easwaren Siva, general manager of content and product technology, 3 Australia.
"The tidal wave of mobile data service adoption presents great opportunities for mobile operators," said Larry Lang, vice president and general manager of the Service and Mobility Business Unit at Cisco. "Through our integration with Kabira, we are able to help 3 Australia effectively optimize their next generation mobile data services."
Deployed on Sun Microsystems® servers using chip multithreading (CMT) technology, the 3 architecture also takes advantage of the Kabira Charging™ software solution. By integrating with the Cisco CSG, the Kabira technology enables 3 to offer an enhanced self-service offering. Prepaid data customers are able to receive real-time reporting of their data usage on their personalized "My3" web self-service facility. The Cisco CSG2 provides 3 with detailed customer usage records that helped the company develop these services.
Kabira Charging 2.0 software utilizes the high-availability and scalability features of the proven Kabira Transaction Platform™, and supports single-server (node) and clustered server deployment configurations. Kabira Charging is supported on SPARC architecture servers running the Solaris 10 operating system, as well as on x64-based servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.
