Vodafone India selects Ericsson to transform prepaid charging system

BANGALORE, INDIA: Ericsson has successfully deployed its industry leading Charging System for Vodafone India.

The Ericsson Charging System enables a host of new services like flexible refill, community charging and real time balance notifications among several other different voice and data offerings for over 75 million prepaid customers. These customers will now be able to adjust their plans themselves, improving their overall customer experience. It will also enable Vodafone to provide personalized offers to individual consumers by understanding their service consumption patterns.

As a part of the five-year agreement, Ericsson will be replacing legacy infrastructure with its new Charging System across five new circles of Uttar Pradesh (W), Uttar Pradesh (E), Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh, in addition to Mumbai & Maharashtra circles where it was already deployed. The deployment will enable convergence across payment methodologies and devices, and enable Vodafone to activate enhanced data charging via mobile broadband charging in the future.

Vishant Vora, Director -Technology, Vodafone India said: "The fast-maturing Indian mobile internet consumers expect greater control and flexibility on the kind of services they want to consume, when they want to consume and how they would like to pay for it. The one size fits all and tiered pricing models for services are being fast replaced by a need for personalized services. We have deployed the Ericsson Charging system to meet these changing needs of our customers."

Chris Houghton, Head of Ericsson Region India, said: "Our solution creates greater monetization opportunities while simultaneously reducing the overall service activation, management and delivery costs. More importantly, it also provides Vodafone the flexibility to maintain one convergent system across all services, networks and payment methods."

The solution offers a dense computing platform, which can process almost double the traffic compared to the legacy solution. This will also help save on datacenter space and energy requirements. Advanced features will allow for better segmentation to drive higher revenue-generating services for Vodafone India. These include personalized offer management, flexible refill and community charging.

Ericsson has been a long-term partner for Vodafone. In 2010, Ericsson was chosen by Vodafone as an exclusive 3G HSPA hardware, software and related service vendor to equip India's largest metropolitan cities; Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata with latest HSPA mobile broadband network.

Worldwide, Ericsson delivers more than 1,500 consulting and systems integration projects every year in multi-vendor and multi-technology environments, and is the clear market leader in real-time charging with more than 280 charging and billing customers globally.