Article Comment: Proliferating billing projects in Australia

25 August 2005

Two Australian news articles suggest that many new billing systems may be developed / configured / deployed into Australia's incumbent telco (Telstra) and its competitors (Optus, AAPT, Vodafone Australia) in the near future.

The first article (news.com.au - Billing Blowout) indicates the four largest network providers intend to upgrade / replace their existing billing systems at an estimated cost of AUD$1 billion. This is being done to address the needs of competition and new IP network deployments, replacing siloed billing systems with software that can address consolidated / convergent billing and contemporary pricing arrangements.

From a billing perspective this could mean that:

• Experienced billing staff may be hard to find, especially for the billers who delay the start of their projects.
• A software vendor chosen by multiple billers may not have sufficient local (especially experienced) staff to support multiple projects. This would be magnified by the need to segment staff to each client, and could require the 'importation' of staff from elsewhere.

The second article (news.com.au - Change 'will split Telstra') suggests that Telstra's new CEO (Sol Trujillo) may break up Telstra (currently a full-service telco) if additional regulations are imposed as part of the Australian Government's sell-off of their 51% shareholding. The article indicates this could include Telstra's directories business (Sensis) and their mobile phone network (Telstra Mobile).

From a billing perspective this could mean:

• Additional billing systems might be required if the direction of consolidated billing (across networks) was reversed and end-to-end billing systems were required for each separate business.
• Within the billers, the business staff who understood the existing billing environments would be in high demand during the disaggregation, but would then need to make a choice (will have a choice made for them...) on which of the separate companies they would eventually end up within.
• From a customer's perspective, where consolidated billing was already in place the billing would need to be disentangled so that each company performed their own network's billing. i.e. charges for white and yellow page directories no longer billed alongside fixed network usage, the billing of mobile network and fixed network calls now performed separately
• If the mobile, fixed and data networks were placed in separate and independent companies, each would require their own interconnect billing and reconciliation mechanisms.

Tags: Billing, Telstra