SAN JOSE, Calif., January 27, 2005 - Cisco Systems® today announced that it surpassed a new milestone in providing mobile operators content billing capacity to support 200 million mobile users around the globe. This milestone is made possible by more than 25 mobile carriers that have deployed the Cisco® Content Billing solution.
"Competition for the delivery of mobile voice and data services is becoming increasingly fierce," said Larry Lang, vice president and general manager, Mobile Wireless Group, Cisco Systems. "By deploying Cisco's Content Billing solution, mobile operators can provide their customers with a myriad of payment options to strike the ideal balance for the billing of voice, messaging, multimedia, games, Web and other mobile services."
One of the barriers to offering value-added content and services has been tied to mobile operators' inability to distinguish different types of content traveling over a Radio Access Network (RAN), and billing the customer accordingly for the accessed content. Voice billing models are generally based on call duration or location, which are extremely inaccurate methods for the billing of data services and content based on file size, or other parameters. To solve this problem, Cisco offers mobile operators its innovative Content Billing solution.
Continuing its long-standing efforts to help carriers evolve their networks to IP Next-Generation Networks (IP NGNs), Cisco provides its Content Billing solution as part of the Cisco Content Services Gateway (CSG) offering. Used by more than 25 mobile operators around the world, the Cisco CSG provides three functions that mobile operators need to offer content-based billing services: dynamic examination of content to determine its nature; controlling subscriber service access; and finally enforcement of subscriber account balances. A single Cisco CSG can simultaneously manage several hundreds of thousands of subscribers, process thousands of connections per second and manage multiple gigabits per second of bandwidth. By adding Cisco CSG as needed within the Cisco Mobile Exchange framework, the service control layer of the Cisco's IP NGN architecture, mobile operators worldwide have the billing capacity to support 200 million mobile users.
The Cisco CSG is part of Cisco Mobile Exchange, an open platform that can readily interface with the control elements in a mobile network, including multiple RANs, back-end billing systems and content filtering and compression solutions. Working in concert with industry partners, including Siemens and Accenture, Cisco's IP NGN strategy helps service providers to meet the needs of customer segments efficiently and economically, as well as provide the foundation for delivering future applications that help to enable sustainable profitability.
More information about Cisco's CSG solution and other mobile service provider solutions is available at www.cisco.com/go/mobile.
