DCA Services Partners With Sixtra to Provide Wireless Billing and Back Office Support

Sixtra is a Latin American company with more than 15 years experience supplying and integrating voice and data technology for a wide range of markets and is the leading provider of prepaid wireless value added service solutions in Latin America. The partnership between DCA and Sixtra will enable DCA to become a mobile virtual network enabler (MVNE), offering a robust range of wireless billing and back office solutions to our new and existing customers, said Joe Webb, president and CEO of DCA Services. This solution will give telecommunications companies an easy, cost-effective means for entering the wireless marketplace. Sixtra is the first company to install a wireless prepaid platform in Latin America with Telefonica Moviles, said Pablo Caram, Managing Director of International Business Development of Sixtra. We are also the first company to deploy a Web-based self-provisioning portal for wireless services, our Account Manager Portal, which allowed seamless convergence between prepaid and post paid services. By partnering with DCA, we can bring this knowledge and expertise to the North American market. This new service addition, branded as DCA Mobile, will allow telecommunications providers who contract DCA for billing services to become mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs), enabling them to resell wireless services from carriers such as Sprint, Verizon Wireless or Cingular without investing in a mobile network or IT infrastructure. The system also allows for real time rating and provisioning of wireless services. Research shows that MVNOs will be major players within the US mobile marketplace. The marriage between DCA and Sixtra gives service providers a complete solution for wireless and wireline billing and back office management, enabling them to focus on revenue-producing functions, such as sales and marketing, Webb said. Under the agreement, Sixtra will provide its proprietary Value Added Service Platform technology to DCA, including licenses, engineering expertise, installation and support services, and software development and customization. DCA will provide all back office services, including billing administration, customer service, accounts receivable management, collections, fulfillment, and invoicing. DCA Mobile includes a feature-rich, Web-based prepaid wireless solution that enables MVNOs to perform self-provisioning and monitoring of their wireless services with a carrier, set rate plans and promotions, and manage prepaid and postpaid services customized to their end-users needs. The Sixtra system is capable of performing online rating and billing of all transactions, and seamlessly interfaces with the external carrier networks supporting both SS7 and VoIP protocols. For wire line carriers, DCA can also offer intelligent and call validation using Sixtras system. The intelligent routing application consists of call processing functionalities that allow a service provider to increase call completion rates and automatically select the optimal route for each call. Using this system, carriers can create services considering cost, margin, quality of service (QoS), call duration and contractual intercarrier agreement variables to ensure that the most effective route is always selected. The call validation solution uses SS7 technology to validate calls in real time and to automatically decide within milliseconds if a call should be allowed to complete or not. Using SS7 signaling, calls are validated against local and external line information databases (LIDb), and the system uses the results of this validation process to determine the final treatment of the call. For example, if a call from a pre-subscribed account line is 90 days overdue, the call validation system can automatically route that call to a customer care center first for collection.