Transactional intelligence provider Openet enables wireless carriers to deploy spending and usage limits for both voice and data services that allow the subscribers themselves to create granular controls over their usage. They can limit it by criteria such as dollar amount, time of day or day of week and physical location to take into account roaming and international charges. Chief marketing officer Mike Manzo said that most carriers are already looking at this as part of a broader effort to gain more control over the usage of their networks, as well as to provide a better customer experience, but the technology to do so is relatively new.</p>

“It is a bit of brush fire in the industry,” Manzo said. “I think it is fair to say the iPhone brought the brush fire on in part because of the size of bills people were getting, but perhaps the biggest use case was international roaming.”

This could be as simple as an SMS message alert every time a consumer spends $20, so they know how fast the money is going and when to stop their usage or switch to a landline. Policy management functions like these used to be static – a carrier would provision the network with a certain set of policies in which quality of service was either on or off. Today that functionality has become both session and subscriber aware, Manzo said.

“Before we make a decision to turn a subscriber on or off, we look at who the subscriber is, where they are and what their subscription is,” Manzo said. “We look at the session information – what kind of information is being passed across the network, VoIP or peer-to-peer, and we make a decision on whether to allow the service to take place or not. Second, we make a decision as to whether or not to change the network in some way.”

These types of adjustments are one way to keep the customers informed of what the final bill will be, as well as offer an opportunity for additional revenue. For example, providing a temporary bandwidth boost for large downloads could come with a price tag of $2. Carriers today are still trying to solve the issue of a data limit on international usage and bills, Manzo said. They can do it today for voice, but a control for data is still about six months in the making. A service, like AT&T’s Smart Limits, lets users exchange $5 per month for a self-care interface they can go into and set up restrictions or notifications about usage. Today that service is marketed as a parental control service, but Manzo sees it having potential for others users as well. It might not be a service that necessarily restricts usage, but it will decrease the risk of surprise when the monthly bill arrives.

“Consumers are all about setting expectations,” Manzo said. “They don’t like to be told things after the fact. So if you set expectations, the bill isn’t as big of an issue.”