Remote electricity purchasing at hand

By Damaria Senne, ITWeb senior journalist

Johannesburg, 26 Aug 2005

Residents in major cities who use prepaid electricity will soon be able to purchase coupons by SMS, says Mira Networks.

The roll-out of the system will be done in association with the municipalities of targeted cities and RMT Systems, a company that uses the technology in Cape Town to enable residents to purchase prepaid electricity through its ibuy.co.za Web site and by SMS, according to a Mira representative. The service will be rolled out in Bloemfontein in the coming weeks and in other major cities soon after.

Mira is an aggregate wireless application service provider (WASP) that develops mobile content and applications that can be accessed by customers of cellular networks.

Prepaid users in Cape Town who wish to use the RMT Systems service can register on the ibuy.co.za Web site. The customer can also register by faxing a completed document to (021) 975-0454 or calling the help-desk on (021) 975-0452 during normal working hours.

Once registered, the customer can purchase prepaid electricity by sending the SMS message "EL [password] [rand amount]" to 33 372. The answering SMS will contain a reference to be used to recharge their electricity. The service is available to all three cellular networks and each SMS costs R1.50.

Initially, RMT Systems managed the SMS back office system internally but decided to outsource to Mira so that it could focus on its core business. As a result, prepaid electricity sales have increased by 30% over the past year, resulting in the expansion of its services to other cities, according to Mira Networks director Sean Conde.

Selecting the correct WASP is a critical success factor, says Conde. WASPs providing inferior mobile services with poor resources and limited technical backup impact negatively on the client`s brand, as end-users experience frustration.

WASPs should manage clients through multiple server farms, he says, run daily backups of critical information and have multiple redundant links to all cellular networks.