In today’s increasingly competitive telecoms market, Communication Service Providers (CSPs) need to respond to competitor offers swiftly and equally to wrong-foot their competition by introducing attractive offers and services into the market that deliver a differentiated and compelling offer to existing and new subscribers.

Historically of course, delivery of new services into the telecoms network product portfolio has been glacially slow. It may require new equipment in the network which has to be procured, commissioned and tested. Provisioning of the service itself is often the major and time-consuming challenge – how to register those subscribers that want or might use the service with the necessary data to enable it to work? Last, but by no means least, having identified the subscribers that may potentially be interested in the service, how do they make them aware of its existence in an increasingly noisy marketplace of services all clamouring for their attention?

One increasingly common way of solving the service selection and provisioning conundrum is to allow subscribers to “try it and see” – perhaps on a free or subsidised basis first off. As with the internet, automation is the key to making such an approach viable. Service Brokers have a major role to play here.

Service Broker connectivity means that key data can be obtained, from several systems if necessary, used to register a subscriber for a service and to provision all the necessary parameters to the equipment and systems that delivers the service. Tried and tested equipment and APIs can be re-used readily, so reducing the time to implement a new service, reducing the likelihood of error and so minimising the commissioning and testing overhead.

So what sort of services are CSPs implementing and provisioning dynamically with Service Brokers? Here are three common examples:

Self subscription to a mobile data service. Even with the proliferation of high-end smart phones we have seen recently, most mobile device users do not use any mobile data services. Use via laptops with broadband modems is exploding of course, we is the use by iPhone (News - Alert) and the like. But it still represents a relatively small proportion of subscribers.CSPs go one of two routes in provisioning mobile data services – they can be pre-provisioned in case the user uses the service – this is straight-forward, but costly in terms of equipment licenses and capacity. Or they can provision on request, which avoids the capacity and licensing issues. But to be effective, provisioning on request must be immediate, automated and invisible to the end user. Using Service Brokers, CSPs are able to deliver mobile data service provisioning (or indeed, other services) on demand efficiently and effectively. The Service Broker can also be used to inform the user by text message of service activation and any key parameters they may need.

In countries where there are a lot of prepaid subscribers and several mobile CSPs, it is common now to see limited period offers or campaigns to acquire new subscribers with “all you can eat” offers of SMS and voice calls. These campaigns are very effective in terms of increasing service use and re-engaging subscribers to use the service. In such markets, subscribers often carry multiple SIMs and switch to the one with the best offer on a daily basis. Regardless of the long term merit of such promotions, it leads to steps changes of service use and increased revenue, but comes with a high cost in terms of peak capacity of the network equipment.Service Brokers are being used to realise such promotional packages. In this case, when the subscriber uses the services or texts to take up the offer, the Service Broker is able to off-load the traffic from the prepaid IN platform for the duration of the offer. Other criteria – such as the total number of messages or voice minutes may also be used to determine the end of the offer. The offer itself may have a cost, and the Service Broker can raise this charge on the prepaid or post-paid system. Then, whilst the offer is in place, the Service Broker can assess which messages/ calls qualify for the offer and authorise them to proceed. Others are referred, as normal, to the prepaid system for authorisation and session control.

CSPs have to comply with various regional, national or global trade regulations. For example, in Europe, CSPs have to comply with EU “Know your Customer” regulations. This requires the CSP (News - Alert) to acquire, check and record certain customer information to be able to deliver service. The problem here is that the regulations are changing and being imposed on a customer base that already exists. CSPs have to inform subscribers of the regulations, their obligations and so forth in order to continue to deliver service – but prepaid subscribers in Europe have historically been allowed to remain anonymous if they wished to do so. Service Brokers are used to sit within the call/ message signalling path, so that the subscriber data the CSP holds on each SIM can be checked within the set-up path and if necessary, warning messages can be sent or announcements played in place of the selected service. This allows near real-time blocking and unblocking of service and demonstrable compliance with the regulations.

There are a myriad of Service Broker use cases. Any requirement that requires acquisition of information from one or more systems plus some logic to perform one action or another – in real-time during the telecoms session – is a good candidate use case for Service Broker. Which explains why so many CSPs have been investigating and procuring them over the last twelve or so months.