Startup satcoms provider Indigo Telecom taps Utilibill for billing & provisioning

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 10 August 2010 10:32

IT Industry - Deals

Startup satellite based mobile communications service provider indigo Telecom has chosen Utilibill to provide its billing and provisioning services platform, and will shortly announce a distribution partner to give it a strong presence in rural Australia.

Indigo Telecom, which launched in July, is using Thuraya's geostationary satellite to provide voice and broadband services to Australians who live or travel outside the coverage areas of terrestrial cellular networks.

Despite the fact that Telstra claims to cover 99 percent of the population and 28 percent of the land mass with Next G, Indigo claims there is an untapped market of up to one million users thanks to inadequacy of available offerings and their poor marketing and distribution strategies.

Utilibill says it has successfully integrated its billing and provisioning platform into Indigo Telecom's network that includes "Australia's first dedicated virtual private network (VPN) and point-of-presence (PoP) for IP data through the Thuraya mobile satellite network."

Indigo Telecom CEO, David Ruddiman, said: "Utilibill provides an extremely powerful wholesale platform, enabling provisioning, billing, customer self service, payments, e-billing, inventory, handset finance, helpdesk ticketing, customer portal, reporting, commission processing and more through a one system solution."

Utilibill managing director, Morgan Duncan, predicts Indigo Telecom will sign up tens of thousands of customers in the first year. "This partnership opens up a major growth opportunity for both companies - Utilibill and Indigo Telecom - to expand their services internationally into other countries that are similarly challenged by the lack of reliable terrestrial network coverage," he said.

(Indigo Telecom Australia is already associated with similar ventures in the US, Africa and Europe, which presumably already have billing and provisioning systems.)

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