Coming off last May’s debut with Alltel Wireless, Cequint is sharing the results of a study it commissioned on caller ID services: Cellular carriers can increase their revenue per subscriber by 4% if just 20% of their customers buy enhanced Caller ID at $1.99 a month.
The study by iGR notes that landline telecom service providers earn hundreds of millions of dollars each year by charging $5 to $10 per month for caller ID. Cellular service providers have not realized revenues related to caller ID because they don’t make their customers’ names and numbers available.
Cequint figures it has a way around the privacy issues, offering its City ID service, which provides information on where a phone number is registered – users see the city and state were the caller’s number resides. Cequint executives say that’s enough information for most people doing their mental gymnastics to figure out who’s calling them on their wireless device. One area code can be associated with scores of cities, so it’s useful to get the actual city narrowed down.
It’s also one of those incredibly simple applications that takes a lot of work to get onto phones, notes Iain Gillott, president of iGR. But once there, it’s relatively easy for carriers to implement compared to many other promising revenue-generators that require a lot of server and data center involvement or touching the network. “Along comes something like Cequint, where there are no changes to the network,” Gillott says. “The carrier doesn’t have to get the network guys involved or IT guys, and that’s hugely attractive these days.”
The City ID application sits in the call handler part of a handset – a strategic location for adding other features, such as reverting certain calls to another number or blocking numbers outside a particular geography from coming through on a child’s phone, Gillott says.
Filed Under: Infrastructure
