Portal Software joins PBBA?s consortium in the lead up to the launch of the world?s first truly mobile broadband service
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA Personal Broadband Australia (PBBA) has appointed Portal Software, Inc. (Nasdaq: PRSF) as its official billing partner in the lead up to the commercial launch of iBurst; the world?s first truly mobile broadband service.
Headquartered in the US with offices globally, Portal offers billing and subscriber management solutions that enable communications and content service providers to optimise revenue from voice and digital transactions. Portal?s solution for PBBA provides end-to-end rating, billing and customer management to support a variety of account models including wholesale, retail, prepaid and post-paid.
Portal will also provide transactional real-time processing that can pre-authorise usage and precisely track start, mid-transaction and stop mobile broadband events as they occur. The events are rated accordingly, creating an up-to-the-second picture of accounts receivable, general ledger and customer balances.
Scheduled for commercial availability later this year, Personal Broadband?s iBurst system is a carrier-grade wide area wireless data network designed for people to have high-speed Internet access wherever they are, whenever they want.
?Billing for advanced wireless services is rather complex, especially for emerging markets such as mobile broadband,? says David Yuen, vice president and general manager, Portal Software (Asia Pacific) Limited. ?Wireless service providers must be equipped to support a variety of devices, account types, payment methods, pricing models and service authorisation ? in real-time. In this sense, Portal?s flexible billing system can actually present Personal Broadband Australia with a competitive edge.?
Says Charles Reed, CEO, Personal Broadband Australia, ?The iBurst service offers great appeal to large enterprise groups, SMEs, sole consultants and single consumers alike. We needed a billing system therefore that was functional enough to allow us to build differentiated services and business models to suit the differing needs of customers.?
He continues, ?At the conclusion of a thorough tendering process, it was clear that Portal?s global solutions were tried, tested and proven to support wireless services with the flexibility to accommodate rapid changes, such as quickly generating new offerings.?
The commercial trial of PBBA?s iBurst service is currently underway with 400 OzEmail and Vodafone customers taking part. This world first in wireless mobile broadband is taking place in Sydney. Personal Broadband services are expected to be commercially available in Sydney by the end of this year and will be delivered on a wholesale basis to distributors such as ISPs, carriers, enterprises and mobile operators.
About Portal Software
Portal Software provides flexible billing and subscriber management solutions to enable organisations to monetise their voice and digital transactions. Portal?s convergent billing platform enables service providers to charge, bill, and manage a wide range of services via multiple networks, payment models, pricing plans, and value chains. Portal?s flexible and scalable product-based solutions enable customers to introduce new value added services quickly, providing maximum business value and lower total cost of ownership. Portal?s customers include thirty-five of the top fifty wireless carriers as well as organisations such as Vodafone, AOL Time Warner, Deutsche Telekom, TELUS, NTT, China Telecom, Reuters, Telstra, China Mobile, Telenor Mobil, and France Telecom. Headquartered in California, Portal has a presence around the globe including offices in Sydney and Melbourne. For more information, please visit
http://www.portal.com.
About Personal Broadband Australia (formerly CKW Wireless)
Personal Broadband Australia is an Australian company that will provide wireless personal broadband access services on a wholesale basis to distributors such as ISPs, carriers, enterprises and mobile operators. These services will give customers high speed, low cost broadband access to the Internet, e-mail and other applications while also giving them complete freedom to move. Personal Broadband Australia uses ArrayComm, Inc.?s iBurst Personal Broadband technology. Investors include ArrayComm, Mitsubishi Corporation, Mitsubishi Australia and Kyocera.
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