The questionnaire guides you through a broad range of aspects that any aspiring MVNO/E should consider in relation to partners and sales management, customer and subscription management, self-care channels, services, tariffs, payments, charging, reporting, integration, churn and campaign management and number portability.
2. Introduction
Based on our broad experience in working
with national and international
MVNOs/MVNEs of all sizes and from
diverse niches, we have conceived a set of
screening questions, hoping it would help
any aspirant MVNO understand the needs
for a technical implementation to help in
operating an MVNO. We have compiled a
series of questions that any aspiring
MVNO should have answers for before
engaging on the road to become a
successful MVNO. Furthermore having
these answers will help in choosing the
most suitable and cost effective
technology platform and business model to
support today’s and tomorrow’s
aspirations. The questions cover a broad
range of aspects related to partners and
sales management, customer and
subscription management, self care
channels, services, tariffs, payments,
charging, reporting, integration, churn and
campaign management and number
portability.
For existing MVNOs and MVNEs the
below set of questions could be the
starting point in getting the status quo and
identify if there is a business case for
replacing existing outdated infrastructure
elements.
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The MVNO/MVNE questionnaire
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3. The MVNO/MVNE
questionnaire
Partners management
1. How would you describe your
relationship with the chosen MNO?
2. Will you have any interconnect partners
or will you use your MNO’s agreements?
3. Will you have any roaming partners or
will you use your MNO’s agreements?
4. Will you have any content provider or
other Value Added Services partners?
5. What kind of content and what channels
will you use to deliver the content?
6. Who will be your partners for scratch
card manufacturing?
7. Who will be your partners for SIM card
manufacturing?
8. Will you use SMS aggregators?
9. What will be the commissioning schema
for partners and how will you calculate the
commission/ fees/ settlements for each
partner?
10. What level of automation would you
like to have implemented for all the
commercial relationship?
Sales management
11. What channels are you planning to use
in your sales process?
12. What distribution model are you
planning to use?
13. What will be the dealers’ sale
commissioning process?
14. What level of automation would you
like to achieve for incentivizing you
dealers?
15. How often and in what degree of detail
are you going to monitor the progress on
sales at your partners?
Customer Management
16. What kind of customers will you
support (prepaid, postpaid, hybrid)?
17. What will be your B2B and B2C
customer models (customer hierarchies,
etc.)?
18. How will you enable customer
registration?
19. How will you manage supplementary
services (call forwarding, barring, etc.) for
your customers?
20. Which activities will be implemented by
customer care (view service usage history,
view/change customer information, SIM
card management, etc.)?
21. What level of empowerment would you
like to assign to you Customer Service
Representatives?
Subscription Management and self care
22. What will be the subscription lifecycle?
23. What will be the subscription activation
and termination process?
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The MVNO/MVNE questionnaire
4. The MVNO/MVNE
questionnaire
24. What channels will you use for self
care?
25. What functions and services will be
enabled via the chosen self care channels
(self care, balance query, etc)?
26. What level of integration is necessary
with your MNO partner for activation/
deactivation of the subscriptions?
Services, tariffs and charging
27. What services are you planning to
include in your service offering from the
beginning or in a secondary stage (voice,
SMS, MMS, data, roaming, content)?
28. What will be your tariffs and what will
be their structure?
29. Will you offer product bundling?
30. How will you manage changes in the
tariffs with respect to existing customers
that are subscribed to a modified tariff?
31. What rating algorithms will you use
and what list of attributes will be relevant
for the rating logic?
32. What will be the zoning configuration
used on rating purposes?
33. How will you charge for roaming
services?
34. Will you have one-time charges/fees?
35. Will your have individual/group
discounts?
36. How often will you need to bring a new
tariff on the market?
37. Do you intend to build technical
capabilities in your own company for the
implementation of new services and
tariffs?
38. Do you intend to offer other than
Telecom related services in your offering?
39. Will you enable real-time charging? If
yes which services will be handled in real
time?
40. Will you enable offline charging? If yes
which services will be handled offline?
41. How will you handle fraud for offline
charged services?
Payments
42. What payment options will you offer to
the end customer?
43. What types of vouchers will you offer
for top-up and what will be the payment
methods? Will they have different units
(minutes, SMS, data, etc) or bonuses?
44. Will you enable airtime transfer
between customers?
45. How will you integrate with voucher
manufacturers?
46. Are you going to allow payments by
credit cards in your online portal?
47. Are you going to allow for some of your
customers negative balances?
48. Will you handle partial and over
payments for your postpaid subscribers?
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The MVNO/MVNE questionnaire
5. The MVNO/MVNE
questionnaire
Reporting
49. What reports will be relevant to you to
follow-up on the business and operational
efficiency?
50. How and when would you like to
receive the reports?
51. How detailed should the reports be?
Integration
52. What will be the integration points of
your solution? What is the purpose of
those integration points and which are the
protocol used?
53. What will be the SS7 connectivity
details: point codes, GT, etc?
54. Will you be able to provide signaling
traces for all the integration points?
55. Will it be possible to charge SMS,
Data, MMS using Diameter Ro interface?
56. What will be the requirements for the
Diameter Ro interface in order to be able
to charge the afore mentioned services?
57. What will be the flows for MOC
(authorized, not authorized, one quanta,
multiple quanta, etc) and MTC, MO Video
Call?
58. What will be the flow for handling SMS,
premium SMS, Data, MMS, call
forwarding, IVR, USSD self care?
59. How will be subscribers initially
provisioned in the HLR?
60. How will you operate changes to the
HLR profiles? What will be the scenarios
when you need to change the HLR profile?
61. Will you have T-CSI active for your
subscribers?
62. What other MNO systems will be
provisioned from the platform?
63. How will you provision subscribers in
the MNO systems?
64. How will you activate services for
subscribers? Which systems are
provisioned for each service?
65. How will you manage supplementary
services?
66. What will be the integration required
for charging the roaming calls?
67. How will you manage USSD call back?
68. Will the MNO support CAPv2 for online
charging of roaming calls?
Churn and Campaign Management
69. What kind of campaigns are you
planning to launch?
70. How will you calculate the risk of
churning?
71. What information will you use as input
in churn
72. What is the number portability process
in your country?
73. How will you handle the rating of the
ported numbers (based on destination)?
74. How will you integrate with other
operators or central authority for number
portability?
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The MVNO/MVNE questionnaire
6. We can help you address
each of these questions
Based on our hands-on experience,
gathered by collaborating with successful
international MVNOs/MVNEs in the last 7
years, we can help you address each of
the above questions and support your
endeavour to become a successful
MVNO/E. The MVNO/E business model is
our professional passion therefore
supporting you in achieving your growth
targets directly influences our level of
corporate accomplishment.
Computaris’ unique, tailored made
MVNO/E suite provides service providers
with pricing and packaging flexibility,
ensuring high performance, scalability, low
TCO and proven, easy integration with
networks and business systems. The
Computaris MVNO/E suite has pioneered
the rating market, anticipating the need for
convergent, flexible and high-performance
pricing and rating for new emerging
services such as VoIP, IPTV, mobile data
and on-demand services. The MVNO core
is implemented in diverse networks
worldwide, providing a convergent, carrier-
grade pricing, rating, charging and billing
solution.
We have extensive experience in
MVNO/MVNE solutions implementations
and we provide a complete range of
services from technical consultancy,
MVNO systems integration into MNO's
network, integration consultancy and
design for the MNO through to E2E
projects (from business requirements to
acceptance testing and project
governance.
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The MVNO/MVNE questionnaire
7. Terms and abbreviations
• B2B - Business to Business
• B2C - Business to Customer
• CAMEL - Customised Applications for
Mobile Networks Enhanced Logic
• CAP - Camel Application Part
• CDR - Call Detail Record
• CRM - Customer Relationship Manager
• DWS - Data Warehouse
• GGSN - Gateway GPRS Support Node
• GPRS - General Packet Radio Service
• GT - Global Title
• HLR - Home Location Register
• ISUP - ISDN User Part
• IVR - Interactive Voice Register
• MAP - Mobile Application Part
• MNO - Mobile Network Operator
• MNP - Mobile Number Portability
• MO - Mobile Originated
• MMS - Multimedia Messaging Service
• MMSC - MMS Centre
• MSC - Mobile Switching Centre
• MSISDN - Mobile Subscriber Integrated
Services Digital Network-Number
• MT - Mobile Terminated
• MVNO - Mobile Virtual Network
Operator
• OCS - Online Charging System
• POS - Point of Sales
• SAP CC - SAP Convergent Charging
• SIM - Subscriber Identity Module
• SMPP - Short Message Peer to Peer
• SMS - Short Message Service
• SMSC - SMS Centre
• TCO - Total Cost of Ownership
• T-CSI - Terminating Camel Subscription
Information
• USSD - Unstructured Supplementary
Service Data
• VMS - Voucher Management System
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The MVNO/MVNE questionnaire
8. About
Computaris
Computaris provides system integration
and software development for the mobile
industry. Its customers know that even
highly complex projects are always
delivered on time and on budget. It does
this through its disciplined yet flexible
approach toward problem-solving.
Computaris has experts with deep domain
expertise that guide customers through
their challenges from start to finish, making
all projects streamlined and personal.
Computaris has delivered over 1,000
successful projects across 20 years and
has worked with over 80 operators in 50
countries.
Computaris is part of the R Systems
Group, a company with over 2,500
employees and 100 million USD turnover.
For more information, please visit
www.computaris.com.
Got any questions? Contact us:
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Email: marketing@computaris.com
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The MVNO/MVNE questionnaire