Crazy John's 'first' with real-time usage info for prepaid - UPDATE

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 16 January 2008 05:00

Your IT - Home IT

Mobile service provider, Crazy John's, claims to have become the first in Australia to give its prepaid cellular customers access to full usage information, in near-real time, however another, Simplus, has offered this option for several years. Crazy John's customers will be able to log onto their account via the web and see full details of all calls made and their current credit balance. According to Crazy John's CEO, Brendan Fleiter, "this is a first in Australia and will be very welcome particularly to parents who provide and pay for mobile services for their children."

However, as was pointed out by a reader of the first version of this article, this option is offered with the iSIM prepaid service provided by Optus subsidiary, Simplus Mobile, whose website provides a demonstation of the feature.

For Crazy John's, the feature is a function of its new converged billing system and Fleiter told iTWire "One of the most compelling aspects [of the billing system] is that you can view your usage online. You can be watching your account on line and see the balance falling [within about a minute] as you make a call."

Users can long on any time and see what calls they have made and what they cost. According to Fleiter, with every other prepaid service in Australia, "you can get a balance on line or by ringing up but you can't see how you got to the that balance."

To achieve this Crazy John's - which switched from being a reseller of Telstra services, after 16 years, to those from Vodafone on 1 July 2007 - has invested over $40 million in upgrading its billing and support systems over the last couple of years. In the process it has moved from being simply a reseller of Vodafone services to a full-scale mobile virtual network operator on the Vodafone network.

"We run postpaid and prepaid on the same billing system," Fleiter said. "No one else [in Australia] is doing that so far that we are aware. It has been a complicated exercise. It requires real-time integration in to Vodafone's network."