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MTN pioneers portal for pre-paid usage

September 11, 2004

Until recently, South African mobile portals were GPRS-accessible only to post-paid subscribers. But now, with the launch of operator MTN's new MTNLoaded portal, the country's mass of pre-paid users can also access premium content over GPRS.

As a large part of South Africa's population still lacks access to bank accounts and credit facilities, the country's mobile market is driven by pre-paid solutions. In fact, more than 85 percent of operator MTN's 6.6 million customer base is pre-paid.

 

This is why MTN has made its recently launched MTNLoaded portal available to pre-paid subscribers too over GPRS. Group Executive Director at MTN Santie Botha says: "MTNLoaded and its GPRS pre-paid offering is something that South African pre-paid users have always wanted, and MTN is delighted to offer this service to them.

 

MTNLoaded offers one of the widest ranges of mobile content and services in South Africa. Updated several times per day, the portal is divided according to lifestyle categories such as music, sport, games, news and information, entertainment and more.

 

The portal's mobile accessibility is of additional significance to South Africa in light of the fact that whereas only about 1.5 million of the country's 40 million citizens have access to the internet, more than 19 million have mobile phones.

 

While MTN takes care of the overall management and marketing of the portal, content aggregation has been outsourced to four aggregators, one of which is Ericsson. As an aggregator Ericsson is responsible for sourcing and managing part of the content, as well as for implementing it into the MTNLoaded platform.

 

Ericsson was originally chosen to act as an aggregator on account of its links with an extensive network of content and application providers, a network that includes partners from Ericsson Mobility World and various media companies.

 

Another reason for Ericsson's selection was the company's vast experience of supplying content to and deploying services with other operators. An example of one such service is M-USE; a mobile music solution developed by Ericsson together with Sony Music. M-USE delivers a wide variety of realtones, polyphonic ringtones, StarMMS, and a selection of artist greetings and autographs.

 

Prior to working with MTN as a content aggregator, Ericsson had been assisting the South African company in formulating a content strategy for its portal. Ericsson had been assigned this task because of its international experience in the sourcing and delivery of content for portals, which forms part of the company's comprehensive portfolio of portal management services; from content aggregation through to billing.

 

MTN needed to design a portal strategy that would work under the constraints of the South African market, with its weak consumer spending power and consequent low-priced content. Ericsson Business Consulting put its experience to work in formulating a strategy that focuses MTNLoaded's content and services on key early adopters, regardless of their handset choice.

 

Phillip Hill, General Manager, products, services and innovation at MTN marketing, says: "Ericsson Business Consulting has provided MTN with best-practice knowledge and experience of operators' mobile content strategies worldwide, as well as hands-on content selection and sourcing within the portal project team. This has helped MTN construct a world-class portal, which puts us considerably ahead of our rivals."