WAP Billing Services

Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) billing presents a shift in mobile payment methods that decouples billing from delivery (bearer-independent billing). Under this model, a subscriber can download a music track and charge the payment to their mobile phone bill without ever having to send or receive a premium text message. In addition, content providers can set multiple price points per each content item, yet deliver their entire content catalog using a single short code. Bearer-independent billing offers greater price flexibility to content providers and opens the door to higher-value transactions and to non-mobile goods and services. 

Sybase 365 enables its customers to employ the latest advances in mobile billing via our Operator Charging Gateway (OCG), a direct interface into the billing systems of mobile operators. Using the OCG, operators can apply charges directly to a subscriber’s mobile phone bill. The OCG is focused primarily on enabling WAP payments, yet is designed to operate as a bearer-independent billing platform that accepts purchase requests from a variety of channels, including: 

• Short Message Service
• Multimedia Messaging Service
• WAP
• The Web

The OCG provides a single point for billing across operators—and across borders. It makes international mobile data services deployments easier, expanding reach and ensuring billing higher success rates because a subscriber’s account can be checked for credit ahead of a transaction. In addition, operators can implement a refund scenario.

Features
A single application programming interface (API) enables charging on various mobile networks. The API supports all the operator charging features, including:

• Payment reservation
• Delivery confirmation
• Purchase confirmation
• Charge reversal
• Ability to rate (price) content according to each operator’s available tariffs
• Comprehensive, real-time revenue reporting (via transaction logging, transaction summaries by operator and content reporting by operator)