The best tech news and comment site on the Web, Techdirt, notes a new hurricane phone offering. One neat point:
The hurricane phone will run you a cool $4,995 — but on the plus side it includes 400 minutes of bundled talk time that never expire, and 120 megs of wireless data services.
This made me stop and think. What if the phone itself was responsible for metering out of service? What if you went into the phone store, and bought a device with 20,000 minutes ‘embedded’? A secure chip on the device would be responsible for eeking out your service.
Suddenly as an operator you don’t need your friends from Amdocs and Convergys to rip a hole in your wallet to build you a billing system. And you don’t need to cut and post bills. Or credit check anyone. Or have much of a customer service team. In fact, all you have to do is shuffle bits from A to B. Who would have thought it?
The only hole I can think of is what happens when you lose your phone or want to upgrade. Maybe it’d just encourage people to take more care… I’m sure there can be a means of de- and re-provisioning conceived, much as with existing pre-pay systems.
Now, where’s a patent lawyer when you need one?
Posted by Martin Geddes at 10:32 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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The trouble with that idea is that you're giving people control of a device which is acting against their interests (in this case, by eventually cutting off their service when they reach their 20,000 minute quota).
When you do that what happens historically - whether it's DRM systems or tachographs or prepayment meters - is that somebody works out how to defeat the system. And while most people can probably live with the destrictions of popular DRM schemes (or not care enough about them to bother defeating them), "free calls forever" is an easy sell. Small shops that sell cheap international calls or unlocking on the side would start unofficially topping up these phones.
Posted by: at June 8, 2006 12:24 PMBeen done many times before, in fact this was the way that Prepaid started out with the Rating being done on the SIM card and containing a 'balance' that decreased as you called.
When you wanted more credit it did some Sim Over-Air Programming to recharge your balance.
Only one problem; huge fraud. That's the problem with giving the data to people without a checksum back at base. In the end the only way to prevent fraud was to rate the call centrally anyway and track all the payments and minutes consumed - but to do that, you need a prepaid system - so the whole thing is actually MORE costly than running a prepaid system. Doesn't mean it was a bad idea though, the customer got to see the cost of the call immediately after it finished (and they could have done much more).
As Ben says, give the whole shebang to the customer, no matter how securely locked down, they will find a way inside to break into it unless you keep checking up on them. You have to hold a bit back...
Go ahead and get the patent though, I'm sure the US patent office will grant it!
Posted by: at June 8, 2006 01:59 PMAs Paul said, that is what a prepaid phone does, however the network bills to the prepaid balance, it is more secur than billing to a chip inside the phone.
With a prepaid phone you do not need to send out bills, so I do not see the advantage of keeping the balance on the pnhone itself.
Posted by: at June 8, 2006 10:28 PMIsn't that like DirecTV, which has been hacked over and over?
Posted by: at June 8, 2006 11:06 PMGiven that SIM cards are reasonably secure, Chip'n'PIN is in every credit card here, and Intel & co and busy pushing trusted computing, is it really impossible to divest some of the operational costs of billing out to the 'edge'? (An open question -- I don't have a strong opinion on it.)
I'm not convinced that such an approach is necessarily doomed technically. Yes, any security system can be broken, but at what cost?
Perhaps I need to write a novel where society collapses after someone works out how to factor large numbers.
Posted by: at June 9, 2006 12:19 PMNot impossible, but historically badly done. There have been a number of reports of fraud on Chip'N'Pin and I would expect a lot more, but it's all relative - the basic credit/debit card and signature was not exactly super-secure!!
Chip'N'Pin must have some checks and balances back at the 'ranch' though I don't know how it's set up.
I'm just not sure where the real advantage is in a ubiquitously-connected world (if you can make a call you're connected)?
Your argument is more about Prepaid vs Postpaid than whether the balance is on the phone or at the operator. I've always said that the idea of getting your prepaid subs onto postpaid was ass-backwards logic.