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Telcom Market Awaits Unified Billing System
Eric Ping receives five telephone bills every month -- for his mobile phone, local fixed-line services, the Internet access fee, long-distance calls and his fax machine.
"They arrive at different times and I have to go to the bank several times a month to pay them," said Ping, who complains that so many bills are a headache to handle.
He is not alone. Most Chinese families receive at least three telephone bills every month. As the country has grown to become the world's second biggest telecom market, its billing system has failed to keep pace with the change.
Not only is the billing system fragmented, but about half the telecom services are still charged by the minute, rather than the second as in many other countries.
Among the more than 1,000 complaints received by the Ministry of Information Industry last year, 40 percent were for billing problems.
As China's telecom market matures, customers are asking for higher-quality billing services which the old-fashioned system cannot satisfy.
However, all that is now changing. Portal Software (Asia Pacific), the leading billing software producer, is currently signing contracts with major telecom operators to provide unified billing platforms.
US-based Portal, which provides billing platforms for three-quarters of the world's top 25 telecom operators, entered China three years ago. Since then it has signed contracts with China Telecom, Jitong and China Railcom, and is in talks with China Mobile.
"Bills for different telecom services should be unified, and we are technically ready to provide a billing platform that counts calls by the second," said Robert Lau, vice president of Portal.
He puts the current billing problems down to a failure by domestic telecom equipment providers to respond quickly to customer needs because the market is relatively small.
"China's telephone billing market is worth about 100 million yuan (US$12.08 million) a year, which is not very attractive for some telecom equipment manufacturers," said Lau.
While the Chinese telecom equipment producers had been focusing on big projects like the construction of the nationwide networks, Portal had won many contracts from domestic telecom operators, he said.
"We almost have no competitors in China."
China would soon become the world's top telecom market, Lau said. There would be a large market for companies producing high-quality billing platforms.
With unified billing systems, Eric Ping expects soon to receive one telephone bill for all telecom services, and hopes his visits to the bank will be fewer.
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