Corsair Announces New Infrastructure Independent Real-Time Billing System With Path to Mobile Commerce.Business Editors PALO ALTO Palo Alto, city, California Palo Alto (păl`ō ăl`tō), city (1990 pop. 55,900), Santa Clara co., W Calif.; inc. 1894. Although primarily residential, Palo Alto has aerospace, electronics, and advanced research industries. , Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 28, 2000 Corsair corsair: see Barbary States; piracy. Enters High Growth Mobile Commerce Market With PrePay Open and PhoneFuel Corsair Communications, Inc. (Nasdaq: CAIR CAIR Council on American-Islamic Relations CAIR Clean Air Interstate Rule (EPA) CAIR Center for AIDS Intervention Research CAIR Changing Attitudes in Recovery CAIR California Association for Institutional Research ), a leading provider of real-time billing and mobile commerce systems for the global wireless industry, today announced its infrastructure-independent, real-time billing system, PrePay Open(TM), and the company's first mobile commerce (mCommerce) application, PhoneFuel(TM). Corsair believes PrePay Open offers wireless carriers the most cost-effective and scalable real-time billing system that supports a broad range of standard wireless infrastructures. PrePay Open also provides the functionality of the WIN II (Wireless Intelligent Network) standard today with an easy plug-and-play software migration to WIN II when the industry is ready. PhoneFuel allows carriers to offer WAP (1) (Wireless Access Point) See access point. (2) (Wireless Application Protocol) A standard for providing cellular phones, pagers and other handheld devices with secure access to e-mail and text-based Web pages. (Wireless Application Protocol) and WEB enabled phone replenishment and account management services to their subscribers. With PrePay Open and PhoneFuel, carriers will have a path to new technology and enhanced prepaid wireless offerings for their subscribers. "We believe that a proven prepaid solution with a cost-effective revenue producing business model will gain momentum as a very attractive, enhanced service Enhanced service is service offered over commercial carrier transmission facilities used in interstate communications, that employs computer processing applications that act on the format, content, code, protocol, or similar aspects of the subscriber's transmitted information; for U.S. wireless carriers as we have demonstrated in international markets," said Carla Schneiderman, Corsair's vice president of marketing, business development & operations. "We also recognize that the prepaid market is growing at a rapid rate in emerging countries such as Latin America Latin America, the Spanish-speaking, Portuguese-speaking, and French-speaking countries (except Canada) of North America, South America, Central America, and the West Indies. and Asia, and that by offering mCommerce applications integrated with a prepaid billing solution, Corsair can begin to open up the Internet to the millions of subscribers who use the wireless phone as their primary means of communication." PrePay Open PrePay Open offers real-time performance and supports wireless infrastructures from Ericsson, Motorola, Lucent, Nortel and others. PrePay Open seamlessly integrates with existing carrier environments and supports interoperable roaming. It offers the performance benefits of the WIN II standard today with a pre-WIN architecture that delivers low cost secure operations through a complete signaling-based SS7 platform. PrePay Open also provides carriers with the investment protection of a software-only upgrade when the industry migrates to WIN Phase II. PrePay Open supports AMPS, TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) A satellite and cellular phone technology that interleaves multiple digital signals onto a single high-speed channel. For cellular, TDMA triples the capacity of the original analog method (FDMA). , CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) A method for transmitting simultaneous signals over a shared portion of the spectrum. The foremost application of CDMA is the digital cellular phone technology from QUALCOMM that operates in the 800 MHz band and 1.9 GHz PCS band. and GSM networks. Because PrePay Open is built on industry-standard architectures versus a switch-intensive model, the system can reap the dynamic technology advances of servers and relational database relational database Database in which all data are represented in tabular form. The description of a particular entity is provided by the set of its attribute values, stored as one row or record of the table, called a tuple. models versus more static voice-trunk-based designs. In addition, PrePay Open scales readily and can cost-effectively support regional or national markets ranging from thousands to millions of subscribers. PrePay Open is built on Corsair's existing PrePay which exclusively supports the Ericsson platform and is distributed by Ericsson in 12 wireless markets in Central America Central America, narrow, southernmost region (c.202,200 sq mi/523,698 sq km) of North America, linked to South America at Colombia. It separates the Caribbean from the Pacific. , Latin America and Europe. PrePay has over 7 million prepaid subscribers and achieved over 400% subscriber growth in 1999. The Gartner Group (company) Gartner Group - One of the biggest IT industry research firms. Address: Connecticut, USA. projects worldwide spending on wireless billing systems to reach $1.7 billion this year growing to $2.4 billion in 2002. PhoneFuel PhoneFuel is a mCommerce application that enables carriers to substantially reduce customer care costs and ultimately increase margins by using electronic replenishment instead of phone cards and allowing subscribers to directly manage their accounts. With PhoneFuel, subscribers gain easy access to their account information, including account balance, call detail and payment history. In addition, PhoneFuel provides PrePay subscribers with "one touch deposit" for replenishing PrePay funds over a WAP enabled phone or the Internet. PhoneFuel can also help wireless carriers reduce customer churn by increasing customer satisfaction and offering a competitive differentiating service. Product availability PrePay Open and PhoneFuel will be generally available in the second half of 2000. About Corsair Communications Corsair Communications, Inc. (http://www.corsair.com) headquartered in Palo Alto, California “Palo Alto” redirects here. For other uses, see Palo Alto (disambiguation). Palo Alto (IPA: /ˌpæloʊˈʔæltoʊ/, from Spanish: palo: "stick" and alto: "high", i.e. is a leading provider of real-time billing and mobile commerce systems for the global wireless industry. The company's PrePay real-time wireless billing system is installed in over 12 markets and supports more than 7 million wireless subscribers. Note: This press release contains forward-looking statements forward-looking statement A projected financial statement based on management expectations. A forward-looking statement involves risks with regard to the accuracy of assumptions underlying the projections. regarding the future financial performance of the company, as well as future products that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially because of various risks, including risks associated with product sales and installation, the ability to bring new products to market, successful completion of potential transactions, economic and political instability in international markets, demand for Corsair's products and services, continued growth of the wireless telecommunications industry, and other risks associated with Corsair's business. For an expanded discussion on such risks, please see the documents filed by Corsair Communications with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. |
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