Premium SMS Billing vs. WAP Billing

Premium rate SMS has been adopted by most of the mobile operators for the purpose of billing. With Premium SMS, the Billing can be done either using Mobile Terminate (MT) or Mobile Originated (MO). The customers on any of the operators in UK can download/order the mobile contents by sending a message to a shortcode, such as 81234, and the money will be charged from the phone bill.
WAP billing, so-called D2C (Direct to Customer) billing mechanism is considered as the next generation of billing approach for the mobile contents. So how does it works. Basically, the customer is required to have a WAP session with the service provider by browsing a WAP page for example, then his MSISDN along with its operator can be identified. With the MSISDN, any purchase by the customer can be recorded and billed directly from the phone bill. Can you see the advantages here:

• A good news for the Third Party WAP content provider. The billing is always their headache. Now with WAP billing, they can be much released and only concentrate on building their wap sites, and all the billing issue can be solved by the service provider.
• A good news for the customer. No shortcode need to be rememberd anymore and the possibility of fraud is much reduced. The hacker can send message to the shortcode with fake mobile number, but there seems no way to cheat this from the wap session.

Dialogue Comms. Ltd has lauched its WAP Billing service called WAP ID service which allow the trusted parter (WAP site provider) connect to Dialogue and obtain the MSISDN for billing. I was working on a Demo wap website in the past week, unfortunately I am not allowed to give more details, even some screen shot to show how the service works for the third-party. Well, whatever, if you are a mobile content provider or about to get money from this, from my experience WAP billing can be your first choice. 3G has come, get your profit from the wireless world!!!!!