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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