The wireless broadband market, which includes wireless local area networks (WLANs), is skyrocketing worldwide. Hotels, airports, and cafés are the main providers of wireless services for their guests. Cybercom developed unrivalled solutions for customer management and pricing.
Lately, people are talking about how wireless local area networks (WLANs) in public places are competing with third-generation (3G) network. Today, WLANs have no speech capacity and are limited in range, but they enable considerably faster transmission than 3G technology. So WLANs are highly suitable for when smaller zones will offer wireless broadband. The primary (and largest) customer group consists of airports, conference facilities, cafés and hotels. And interest is spreading .
Cybercom developed a customer-management and billing solution for enterprises that offer WLAN services to their customers. The solution keeps track of the capacity and time that customers use and then invoices customers according to applicable price lists. "Our solution manages customer contact from beginning to end - from registration and network activation to pricing and invoicing," says Håkan Gillman, Cybercom.
When it comes to developing services, WLANs put new demands on business logic.
"Today, business logic related to WLAN primarily deals with time based pricing – like most ordinary telephony," says Håkan Gillman.
"In the future though, one might not only focus on time to decide the price. Instead, other variables will set the price, for example, a user's position when logging into a network or which Web sites the user entered to get access to certain services. Also the type of data or the volume of data used might affect the price."
Gillman thinks that the WLAN market is growing. Many different players are talking about WLANs in public places - from conference facilities, cafés, and hotel chains to large telecom operators. WLAN-technology is inexpensive and a strong complement to 3G services.