Cisco Mobile Exchange deployed by 3 Italy and mmO2

February 23, 2004

Cisco Systems announced that its Cisco Mobile Exchange platform is being deployed by 3 in Italy for the delivery of third-generation mobile data services to both consumer and business users.

The Cisco Mobile Exchange allows an end customer to choose from a range of billing models depending on the services they use; and get a consistent standard of service regardless of where they are in the world and whether they are on a business, a consumer, post-paid or pre-paid contract on 3.

The Cisco Mobile Exchange gives 3 Italy service control, billing flexibility and scalability for the launch of Italy's '3 for Business Open,' one of the first programs for the development of mobile applications that benefit from the potential offered by 3G.

Edoardo Verduci, Marketing Director of H3G Italy's HQ, said: "Thanks to the Cisco solution, we can effectively deliver to our customers the World-Wide Web, mobile office and other products with a wide choice and flexibility in terms of value-based billing. Cisco also provided us with the ability of delivering reliable, scalable, cost-effective products in a simple and flexible way."

The Cisco Mobile Exchange platform will also be deployed by mmO2, a European mobile operator with operations in Germany, Ireland and the UK, for the introduction of a data services billing concept based on content rather than call duration or bandwidth use. The service, dubbed 'Variable Charging, Routing and Rating' (VCRR), uses the Cisco Mobile Exchange platform and will allow users to be charged in accordance with the value of the products and services they use rather than the basic per-minute or per-bit basis, giving mmO2's customers a far more detailed and streamlined billing experience than previously.

VCRR was developed in response to the growing need for an intelligent approach to mobile data services billing. The issue of how to charge for data transfer has become an acute problem for the mobile industry since the introduction of MMS and particularly as operators move from GPRS to 3G networks. In these increasingly data-centric environments it is becoming more and more important to be able to distinguish what kind of content a user is accessing and to bill them accordingly -- so that, for example, MMS messages are billed on a per-message basis while WAP pages are charged on a bandwidth basis, even though WAP is the underlying protocol for both.

VCRR is being implemented across the mmO2 group, initially being rolled out in Ireland in the second quarter of 2004, to be followed by the UK in the following months. The system analyses content types using Cisco's Content Services Gateway software, part of the Cisco Mobile Exchange architecture, which is integrated in a Cisco 7600 Series Router chassis. Information on content is fed into a billing system from Redknee.