Prepaid services constitute a very different business case than other telephony services, so service providers need to manage carefully the business, network, technical, and customer-care aspects of the business.

The following issues should be considered from a business perspective when deciding whether or not to become a prepaid-card service provider:

• margins on which the business case is built
• amount of negotiation needed with the carrier for the inbound and outbound circuits
• overhead needed to be built in order to be able to come up with the rate charged per minute
• whether the service is provided wholesale or retail through owned distribution channels
• billing capabilities that must include consideration of issues such as taxes and carrier reconciliation

Issues that should be considered from a network perspective include the following:

• call volumes, which play a large role in determining the type of platform required
• the number of circuits inbound and outbound, the number of circuits reserved for external sources
• (e.g., information services), and the number of circuits reserved for IVRs
growth rates, because if the number of call minutes is growing very fast, maximization of revenues entails expanding the platform to keep it ahead of growth; for instance, if the platform was built to support 10 million call minutes and has reached this number very fast, then there will be a period where there is demand for more, the service provider will not be able to provide the service

Issues to be considered from a technical perspective include the following:

• average call duration
• busy hour factors
• transactions per call
• number of cards
• number of active users
• average-usage prepaid cards

Issues to be considered from a customer-care perspective include the following:

• It is important that the customers of a prepaid service are well-managed and that expectations are set up correctly. If customers are not being well-managed, there may be problematic scenarios. For example, the platform owner may be wholesaling minutes on the platform, and the buyer of the minutes may be pushing more minutes than he bought. In this case, the platform owner has two problems at hand—the first is unhappy customers who were unable to complete their calls—and the second is customers who need to be managed in such a way that what has been sold matches what has been bought.

• It is also important to consider the time required to set up a call. This issue can also be regarded as a network issue, as it relates to the type of circuits being negotiated with the carrier and can also be regarded as a business issue as it relates to the overhead that needs to be built in.