Intec Telecom Systems recently launched a WLAN settlement and billing product. While this announcement may not seem like news to rock the Wi-Fi world, it could signal the readiness of major telecom companies to embrace 802.11-enabled access as a paid service — or, at the very least, a willingness to hedge bets as the industry takes shape.

Intec already works with many of the world’s traditional telecom powers. Now the company proposes to collect network-usage information and deliver pricing and billing systems for an entire spectrum of WLAN services that might be consumed someday by roaming WLAN users.

Future IP-based applications could include WLAN user authentication, simple Internet access, data-traffic management, VoWLAN (Voice over wireless LAN), messaging and content delivery. Intec also might integrate WLAN charging with roaming wholesale charging on 3G, GSM, CDMA and conventional networks. This would allow providers to engage a single revenue-generation machine operating across multiple access transport technologies.

Evolving Business Case

The business case for public WLAN access will continue to evolve, and early providers of 802.11 hot spots soon may feel encroached upon by the arrival of established telecommunications companies — both wired and wireless. Joining the ranks of T-Mobile, NTT, British Telecom and AT&T will be just about every service provider that claims a substantial base of business customers. When they will support the technology with a dedicated sales force and an advertising campaign is anyone’s guess. And the degree to which they will build out their own access point infrastructure is equally debatable.

Some see the telecom giants as slow-moving latecomers to the market — but there has been no need for them to contribute to the mountains of hype surrounding Wi-Fi. There are very few paying customers today, so they can wait. If and when the public WLAN opportunity matures into a billion-dollar industry, it will still represent only a small dot on the overall telecom-revenue landscape.

Radio Silence

Established carriers will not remain idle for long — not with the prospect of top-tier business revenue flowing to upstart providers. But their relative state of “radio silence” has been in sharp contrast to the marketing drums being beaten by Intel, Toshiba, Ericsson and other technology vendors.

What remains to be seen is just how the telecom giants go about integrating new WLAN offerings into their OSS (operations support systems) and how they propose to share revenue with the owners of access venues, with their fellow network operators and with credit-card companies, as well as with various aggregators and financial clearinghouses.

No Room to Roam

“The issue of roaming is complex,” Yankee Group analyst Sarah Kim told NewsFactor, “because it touches on multiple related processes, including network discovery, security (authentication and authorization) and revenue assurance. Needless to say, many schools of thought exist for each of these layers.”

With an established leadership position in the intercarrier billing-systems sector and a solid reputation as a supplier of convergent mediation software, Intec Telecom Systems sees public WLAN access as one of many services that its customers need to account for (and bill for) — not all that different from VPNs, long-distance voice, SMS or traditional wireless roaming. Many of the hurdles that cloud current forecasts for public WLANs will be worked out as the market develops and service providers get a sense of what people are willing to pay for WLAN access on the go.

Then There’s Politics

“Politics is yet another important issue,” noted the Yankee Group’s Kim. “Not all network operators want to necessarily open their networks to visiting users.”

While WLAN access belongs to the technology elite and “first movers” today, it may become a market that the big telcos and wireless operators seek to incorporate into a bundle of services for their business subscribers. And roaming issues will be key.

UK-based Intec Telecom Systems, with the lion’s share of the traditional telecom settlement business, may inherit some of the responsibility for WLAN settlement from telco customers. AT&T, BellSouth, Brazil Telecom, France Telecom, Hutchison 3G, Orange, Telecom Italia, SBC, Swisscom, T-Mobile, Telia, Vodafone and Verizon are among the more than 300 worldwide customers of Intec’s traditional settlement solutions.

Enter Intec

Jason Andrews, Intec’s North American implementation manager, told NewsFactor that the company’s new WLAN offering “was created to generate revenue for WLAN network operators and the numerous RBOCs, cable operators, cellular carriers and others that offer end-users the capability of using hot spots.”

Intec’s public WLAN technology is a natural extension of its current business, incorporating its established Inter-mediatE and InterconnecT product lines. The WLAN application is based on a combination of the company’s convergent mediation, settlement, payment management and roaming technology, which is already familiar to many telecom network operators.

The WLAN product collects and processes usage and traffic data from charging gateways, then interfaces with the operator’s roaming and billing systems. Customer activity is then identified, rated and billed. The Intec WLAN Solution includes many of the same capabilities that initially were developed for more common telecom services, including roaming, prepaid, post-paid and current-paid models, balance management and authentication, rating and revenue sharing, and content and transaction identification.

They Will Come

As a part of the new WLAN package, Intec’s convergent mediation system, Inter-mediatE, collects usage information from the WLAN login and transaction server, charging gateway or switch and then processes it according to user-defined business rules. Intec’s Active Payment Mediation component takes care of any third-party authentication, balance management or payment validation that is necessary.

Validated usage records then are passed to InterconnecT, the company’s flagship partner-to-partner billing system for rating, revenue allocation and billing. It is at this stage that the Intec WLAN Solution can incorporate roaming data provided by other WLAN access companies to ensure that customers are billed appropriately under terms of their agreements. This will lead to the seamless type of experience that most cellular phone customers experience today.

Having announced vendor partnerships that include Transat Technologies and Nokia, Intec Telecom Systems appears ready to capitalize on the market for WLAN roaming, whenever it develops. The company is publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and has a healthy OSS business, in addition to a large share of the packaged interconnect billing and settlement software business. Mostly likely, neither Intec nor its large telecom clients will have to chase the WLAN market. It will come to them.