The African cellular market outside of southern Africa has traditionally been slow to adopt new technologies. Service providers have primarily supplied SMS, prepaid and voice mail services.
"But 2003 has shown an emerging interest to third party services such as the downloading of ring tones and logos, services that were popular in SA 18 months ago," explained Comverse regional support manager Jaco Botha.
"As the market becomes more educated, we are noticing an adoption of new added-value products which market analysts did not anticipate. Many predicted that the African market would not adopt these value-added services, but the opposite is happening," he added.
"We are also seeing an interest in MMS in Nigeria. In that market users have some of the most sophisticated handsets available," he explained.
Botha said the African market remains primarily prepaid. Nigeria, for example, has 99% of its users on prepaid services. "This is not purely because people cannot get credit but because the prefer paying upfront."
In terms of billing systems, until now, operators have had to purchase separate pre- and post-billing hardware and software systems.
Botha said there is a move to combine pre- and post-billing technologies. "If 99% of your market is on prepaid, it means that most of your income is from prepaid. But operators are required to use two billing systems, one for pre- the other for post-paid billing. Clearly, the investment in a post-billing system is not cost-effective if it only represents 1% of your customer base."
In line with this, Comverse has launched a combined pre- and post-billing system that will significantly reduce the cost of investment and eliminate the need for separate pre- and post-billing systems. "This will mean a far lower cost to operators through a single unified billing system," explained Botha.
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