About 89 percent of executives surveyed by Deloitte (News - Alert) believe service providers, particularly Internet service providers such as telcos and cable companies, will be limited to providing access services in the future, as major revenue drivers. That is a major finding. No matter what executives might hope, nearly nine out of 10 respondents think "access," essentially "pipe services," will remain the role for ISPs.
For that reason, many in the industry believe that service providers have to find ways to create new products that involve providing value in new ways, so pricing and packaging can be handled in new ways.
In conjunction with the holding of the Mobile World Congress 2012, Allot Communications is releasing Pinball, an educational mobile game that explains value-based data pricing plans for subscribers and operators. Get the Allot (News 
- Alert) Pinball Challenge download here.
The point of value-based pricing and packaging is that different applications are valued differentially by different customers.
That means, in principle, that service providers should be able to create service plans and features that appeal to those interests.
Allot Pinball aims to bring complex concepts of mobile data pricing to the players’ fingertips. With Allot Pinball, anyone can become a mobile operator and try to effectively charge for over-the-top traffic while providing the quality of experience.
In Allot Pinball, the game scoring is a combination of the QoE and of the mobile operator’s revenues per application. Each OTT application, such as video or VoIP, delivers a different QoE and revenue scoring combination.
Each level of the game represents a value-based charging plan offered by mobile operators, such as “Happy Hour” or “Social networks” plans.
The Allot Pinball Mobile App is available for download to the Apple (News - Alert) iPhone or iPad or to any Android device.
Tournament updates and giveaways are available on Facebook and Twitter. The app demo is available on YouTube.
Gary Kim (News - Alert) is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Gary’s articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by
Rich Steeves
