Hotmail not yet ready for cell phones
Posted by configure on 15 December 2001 - 05:25 · no comments & 273 views
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Although the service has been trailed successfully in Denmark and Switzerland and will be rolled out commercially there early in the new year, Microsoft will have to wait for wireless operators elsewhere to install new billing software.
“It could take several months,” said Judy Gibbons, European director of MSN.
Microsoft had hoped to roll out the service early in 2002. It believes the service could become a huge revenue generator in Europe, where communicating via text messages has become a way of life for young people and is also catching on with others.
Worldwide, about one billion text messages are sent to mobile phones every day, most of it in Europe where almost all networks have been linked up.
Ironically, operators are extremely keen to drive up data traffic to offset declining revenues from voice telephony, and European operators have spent $100 billion on radio spectrum for third generation fast mobile data services. Yet they are missing out on extra revenue because they do not know how to bill people who receive text messages. Mobile operators in Europe are only used to billing the sender.
Microsoft’s offering will mean that subscribers can choose to be notified if selected people send an email. They can then ask for the email to be forwarded in strings of text messages, each with a maximum size of 160 characters.
This requires billing technology that can charge the receiver rather than the sender of the text messages, which cost between 0.10 and 0.50 euro apiece, depending on the operator.
Unless they have already installed modern billing software for upgraded mobile data networks, operators cannot bill the Hotmail user for the requested text messages.
Reverse Billing
A spokeswoman for Vodafone, Europe’s largest wireless operator, confirmed not all networks are ready for this “reverse billing.”
A spokeswoman of Geneva software, a company that makes billing software for the new data networks that can handle reverse billing, says the old “legacy systems” of wireless operators can not manage it.
Worldwide Hotmail has 118 million active users, but Microsoft has chosen to offer the service first in Europe, where mobile phone penetration is now around 70 percent and texting has become a very mature business.
Microsoft’s technology partner Migway, a joint venture between Danish mobile operator TDC Mobile International and Anglo-Dutch IT services and mobile solutions provider CMG , is the company building the bridge between Hotmail and the text services.
Gibbons said Microsoft’s relationship with Migway, and CMG’s excellent contacts with operators, is helping it to overcome the billing issue of the 40 operators Microsoft wants to sign up.
Microsoft and the mobile operators will share any revenues from the text messages generated by Hotmail.