Both enterprises and users are adopting mobile billed services at a fast growing rate. Mobile terminated billing, also known as premium billing, has seen massive and rapid growth as a direct result of the development mobile content delivery to mobile networks. A large number of mobile operators all over the world have embraced premium SMS services in spite of the fact that they were not designed as a facilitator for micropayments.



MT billing services, currently provided by networks in a variety of different ways, are designated for subscription based content. As opposed to premium rate SMS services, wherein users are charged for sent messages, with MT billing services users are charged for received messages. This means that customers have the opportunity to offer a wide range of flexible services.

The advantages of using premium SMS billing services include easy interconnect for delivery and billing purposes between customers and the service provider, fully transactional ACID compliant MT billing and MT Delivery system, as well as secure delivery through Point to Point connection to mobile networks.

Mobile terminated billing services also come with the disadvantage that there is a possibility of fraud, as hackers can send messages to a shortcode with fake mobile numbers.

Some providers of premium billing services have extensive experience in this field and are able to provide their customers a suite of comprehensive solutions that cater to a wide range of requirements. One of these providers in South Africa is Mira Networks, a company with considerable experience in premium billing that pioneered this technology with all the existing networks. Among others, the team of professionals at Mira Networks has conducted the pilot phase of the implementation of mobile terminated billing in South Africa. Their experience in this field of activity enables them to operate MO billing and MT billing in a very reliable and secure manner. Their tailor-made infrastructure enables customers to plug into their platform seamlessly.

Mira Networks also provides USSD services for all South Africa customers. The USSD applications are designed to allow users to browse for information within a session-based service. Their costs are considerably lower than those of SMS services, as they are typically charged per minute.

The USSD technology does not depend on any devices and there are no requirements for special activation. There are specific requirements that this technology can be formatted to. In addition to this, it is typically implemented for content delivery, ordering and subscriptions.

As far as content delivery goes, USSD applications are ideal for marketing, enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, information services, surveys, business applications, system support and so forth.

In terms of ordering, the USSD technology can be used to create a menu-driven system that end-users can use without an Internet connection. Menu-selected information is automatically updated and sent to end-users, which allows the expansion of their access and reduces data-capture costs significantly.

With Mira Networks? USSD subscription services end-users can use their mobile devices to register and de-register for a service. The service providers can use this application to build an attribute database through the information that end-users provide.