Three UK's mobile data charges - how they add up

COO Graham Baxter talks roaming charges and the challenge of calculating mobile data bills

Mobile operator Three carries 41.5 per cent of the UK's mobile data traffic (according to a 2013 Enders analysis) despite having only one in 10 of the country's mobile users as subscribers.

This preponderance of heavy users, says COO Graham Baxter (pictured), is due to the company's focus on mobile data services from an early stage.

"We made it affordable," he said. "The game changer is when we launched the One Plan, our 'all you can eat' package, back in 2010. Everyone was scared to use data services before then, because they didn't know how much they were going to get charged."

So, as the mobile revolution took off, Three deliberately attracted customers who used their mobile devices for far more than calls and SMS, and they seem to have stuck around. The company's subscribers, Baxter said, use an average of 2.6GB of data per month. They are almost all consumers (rather than business users) who are "very heavy users of data services".

Baxter said the current battleground is roaming charges, as people are scared of running up huge bills when overseas.

"I was travelling with someone who had a Vodafone SIM and within 24 hours they'd spent £155 and all they'd done was run 12 speed tests. As a consumer who has to pay his own bill what are you going to do? I've seen a lot of people turn their phone off when they go abroad."

Three was early to market with a service that allows users abroad to consume data, within limits, based on their domestic tariff.

But this focus on data has placed quite a burden on Three's back-office systems, a weight that is growing as 4G services are rolled out. Particularly complex in this data-centric world is billing for usage, as Baxter explained:

"If I phone you it's basically a simple point-to-point connection. Apart from the start and end of the call there are no events for the system to collect. The data world is very different. You've got a massive number of transactions - video, browsing, multiple apps accessing services at the same time - so it's a completely different scenario."

So, for Three the challenge is to control and manage access to all these data services, while at the same time offering a real-time view so customers can see the amount of the data they are consuming and the costs attached to these services.

When the mobile provider started a decade ago its core infrastructure was tied together with the Tibco Rendezvous message bus for enterprise application integration, and also the transactional processing solution Kabira - which was later bought by Tibco. It was therefore logical that it should turn to that company again for this project.

"We're using [Tibco] Business Events Extreme for our online charging system [OCS], and we've still got the Kabira suite in there too," Baxter said, explaining that the system is geared up to collect and process events in the shortest possible time.

"On the networking side it's about real-time events and real-time charging, we do everything in real time, which is quite unusual ... all these events need to be captured and made available in real time."

Baxter explained that the OCS is part of an ongoing company-wide integration programme to bring all the channels of the business together to create an omni-channel approach. For the customer this will mean a unified experience across Three's various services, and for the company tying together legacy systems will lead to operational efficiencies.

"Historically we've had pretty similar functions but done in a different way. That's not efficient and not good when you move between channels. We're providing a single access layer so that when you go online or into the store or the contact centre you're using the same technology, the same access mechanisms, and for us it's build once, use everywhere."

Baxter sees Tibco as a good fit for this integration programme, not just because of its real-time transactional and integration capabilities and long relationship with Three, but also because of its experience in other sectors, where he sees a real cross-over.

"It's very reliable, but more than that, they are trying to solve the same sorts of problems we're trying to solve. Take retail, they're way ahead of us in terms of omni-channel, and so we're benefiting from the fact that Tibco has experience in this area."

Graham Baxter was speaking to Computing at the Tibco Now event in San Francisco.