Cingular Off Portal Purchasing Control (OPPC) System

Cingular announces important changes to the way its Subscription and Refund Management (SRM) system will work, mainly to improve Cingular's visibility over end-user subscription status to 3rd party content.

Under the new and revised SRM system, content providers no longer need to handle the double opt-in user interaction before starting a new subscription on Cingular's SRM platform. Instead Cingular will handle the double opt-in management through its Qpass billing platform.

Here's the old message flow:


And here's the new message flow:


The new system has the advantage that Cingular customer service reps will be able to handle consumer complaints more effectively and verify consumer claims about opt-in status to specific campaigns.

For Quios customers who use the Quios Permission Management System (QPMS) no changes will be needed. Quios will handle the revised requirements transparently to our customers.

The change-over is expected to take place by the end of Q3 2007.

T-Mobile and Games/Applications

T-Mobile announced today that all J2ME games and applications need to be certified by their independent certification partner, True North Service, before they will be approved by T-Mobile and made available to T-Mobile subscribers.

This new requirement doesn't change the previous requirement that all J2ME games and applications need to be part of T-Mobile's white list of approved applications.

The new independent certification step needs to be completed before submitting your short code campaign to T-Mobile for approval, hence further lengthening the approval process and time-to-market for your campaigns. Make sure to give yourself plenty of time (at least 10-12 weeks) to go through the entire T-Mobile approval process.

If you currently sell J2ME games on a T-Mobile approved short code, you need to contact True North within 30 days to start the re-certification process.

For True North Service contact details, contact us.

Sprint Premium SMS Message Flow (Updated)

Sprint is changing the way gateway providers interact with Sprint's message delivery and billing systems. Whereas content providers just deliver the proper premium sms message to gateway providers like Quios, we work behind the scenes to (i) deliver the content to the cell phone user; (ii) initiate a billing transaction with Sprint's billing system.

Previously, we were first initiating a billing transaction before attempting to deliver the content. Sprint is now requiring us to reverse this message flow, and first attempt to deliver the content, before initiating a billing transaction.

The message flow change will take effect on Wed. May 9th between 2am and 4am PT.

Customers do not need to change anything on their side. As is the case with the other carriers, Quios will perform retries on all failed billing transactions to optimize the success billing ratio.


We don't expect this change to have any material effect on success billing ratios. It will reduce the number of complaints from consumers about being charged for content that was never delivered. On the other hand, this new system could lead to content being delivered successfully without being charged (ie. message delivery succeeds but billing fails).


UPDATE: Sprint has warned aggregators to expect a reduction in success billing ratios of up to 25-30%, part of which is due to the rationalization of delinquent subscribers on their network. However, we have no further visibility on how this will affect individual content providers.