Volubill, a leading supplier of real-time convergent charging and policy control applications for fixed and mobile service providers, has announced an important win and successful deployment with one of Botswana’s largest mobile providers, Orange Botswana. Volubill’s CHARGE-IT™ platform was selected to unify charging and access control for all Mobile Broadband access, Web and WAP browsing, downloads, MMS and e-mail services, thus enabling more flexible and personalized service pricing and bundling options across the provider’s fast growing customer base.
Orange Botswana, incorporated in 2003, is the leading national provider of telecommunication services in Botswana, providing both postpaid and prepaid mobile services to individuals and businesses including a full range of voice and data services. Orange Botswana is experiencing high demand for their data services on the back of their iPhone launch and competitive Mobile Broadband access offerings. Orange Botswana is now also able to offer customers highly flexible charging options. Orange Botswana also enables subscribers to purchase additional prepaid credit directly from their phones and transfer airtime to other prepaid subscribers.
The recent liberalization of Botswana’s telecommunications market, combined with continued heavy subscriber growth in the region has produced intense levels of competition among Botswana’s service providers. The country now has the greatest market penetration for mobile services per capita of any country in Africa. In Orange Botswana’s case, this growth presents tremendous opportunity and hence enhancing their ability to offer high quality of experience and interesting pricing packages across multiple service types is a smart market move. The choice of Volubill’s CHARGE-IT by Orange Botswana shows that providers are meeting these demands by choosing charging and policy solutions that can increase their options for market segmentation as well as service management and monetization.
Volubill’s solution is network independent and provides flexible, vendor-agnostic support to adapt to all data and service architectures. It handles subscriber usage of IP services including data (mobile broadband), content, messaging, VoIP and downloads, and provides capabilities like deep packet inspection (DPI), access control, policy management and traffic shaping, and user experience management for both simple Internet access or content-rich premium services. When partnered with Volubill’s CONTROL-IT™ product, CHARGE-IT™ enables end-to-end real-time control, charging and policy management for advanced services.