Digicel, the new kid on the block that is shaking up the mobile market in the Caribbean and Central America, has bought ECtel’s RA solution for all 24 of its national operations. The implication is very straightforward: consolidated purchasing of revenue assurance technology is cost-effective for a geographically distributed group of telcos. Israeli vendor ECtel will doubtless have some technical challenges in tailoring their product to the different circumstances of each Digicel business unit. However, the cost of this is small compared to the wastage represented if each unit was to acquire or develop its own solutions. Standardization makes as much sense for revenue assurance as it does for the underlying OSS/BSS.
Rather teasingly, ECtel’s press release states the proof of concept “identified substantial revenue losses”. This implies the product may have already paid for itself. There is a less positive way of saying the same thing: Digicel did not know how much it money it was leaking, and could have found those leaks through a one-off audit. Unfortunately, without more details to substantiate this claim, we will never know…
