Demand for prepaid international calling services has continued to grow in recent years with sustained economic migration
between countries and continents. However, the call margins achievable have declined as international rates have dropped
and there has been some erosion of the potential demand with fixed mobile substitution and the growth of IP telephony.
This has led to consolidation of a significant portion of the service provider market as the economies of scale prevail both
in terms infrastructure and termination rates, with smaller innovative operators addressing specific niche markets, and a
very wide range of agents and resellers with the local community knowledge to promote those services.
The requirements now of the larger consolidated prepaid service providers are to scale their platforms to support
expansion from organic growth and acquisitions, to migrate services to IP networks to reduce infrastructure costs and
to innovate to be able to offer resellers the most competitive services available. Prepaid service providers are also
looking to diversify with new applications and markets, including IP telephony, prepaid mobile, prepaid residential and
prepaid wholesale services. The primary need of the smaller service provider is to obtain a complete, cost-effective
platform that very rapidly enables the roll out and adaptation of services in a fast-moving market.
DIGITALK has also delivered prepaid solutions to mobile service providers, with integration of SMS / MMS and voice charging,
offering prepaid service providers yet another route to market expansion and exploitation of the capabilities of the DIGITALK
Multiservice Platform.
APPLICATIONS
The key application for prepaid service providers is Prepaid Cards, but DIGITALK has additional application to offer those operators looking to extend their service offering:
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Prepaid Cards
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DIGITALK has embedded its very significant experience delivering prepaid solutions around the world in its
market-leading Prepaid Cards application to the benefit new service providers and those migrating to a solution
that addresses their requirements for scale and performance.
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Prepaid Mobile
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The DIGITALK Multiservice Platform supports prepaid charging for mobile services, including SMS, MMS and
mobile telephony.
Charging features enable mobile service providers to offer targeted promotional mobile packages. As well as enabling
the service provider to offer competitive international mobile rates, the solution includes voicemail access for a complete
service capability and can be combined with Broadband Telephony and Prepaid Residential to offer a
distinctive service bundle.
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Prepaid Residential
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Prepaid service providers can very easily exploit their platform capability and expand their solution offer with
callback and indirect access services on the DIGITALK Multiservice Platform by adding Prepaid Residential applications.
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Prepaid Wholesale
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Having negotiated competitive rates and offered services direct to customers, prepaid service providers can
very rapidly expand their market opportunity by working with partner organizations, other service providers
and call shop owners to deliver ‘white label’ services and wholesale rates.
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Broadband Telephony
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DIGITALK Broadband Telephony is deployed to support hundreds of thousands of users, providing large prepaid
service providers with a firm foundation to address this growing market opportunity.
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The DIGITALK Multiservice Platform supporting the Media Application Server is ideally suited to meet the needs of growing prepaid service providers migrating to next generation networking. This platform offers the scalability, availability and reliability required to offer high quality services to a broad and varied market. The platform also provides the basis on which customers can introduce additional services to address new market opportunities, fixed and mobile, retail and wholesale.
customers
DIGITALK’s extensive range of Calling Card deployments includes the following prepaid service providers:
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