The calling cards business model offers a relatively low cost entry into the lucrative telecom market segment. Service providers offering prepaid services have been typically characterized by high volumes and low margins until recently. Although there is a continuous growth of demand for long distance calling services the margins decline in the opposite direction due to several factors like dropping international rates, increasing demand for new technologies like broadband telephony and fixed mobile substitution. Hence, the essence of the calling cards business model became creatively segmenting customers by various demographic and/or behavioral characteristics and to design PSTN calling service offerings to meet their specific calling needs. The calling cards business typically attracts entrepreneurs who want to enter the VoIP market, businesses with established retail distribution channels, and service providers who want to diversify their revenue streams.

The Verscom Calling Cards Solution

Verscom offers Calling Card Service Providers off-the-shelf PSTN calling solutions that dramatically reduce the barriers to market entry and help them keep their competitive advantage. Verscom calling card solution line addresses any type of service provider –large, small, niche, virtual- by any type of PSTN calling application - prepaid, postpaid, toll-free, premium numbers- on any network -pure SIP-based carrier networks or large, converged TDM/SIP networks-.

Verscom Calling Card solution line is a next-generation approach for delivering a cost-effective, feature-rich calling card services that can be readily deployed network wide through SIP-enabled media gateways or VoIP networks. Based on a pure IP implementation, the Calling Card solution offer significant advantages over legacy, TDM-based calling card approaches. Cost-effectively deliver market-proven Prepaid and Postpaid Calling Card—featuring real-time rating and billing, telephony service logic (IVR), and web-based subscriber self-provisioning.

The Verscom Calling Card Solution provides a complete solution for prepaid or postpaid calling services that includes telephony service logic (IVR), real-time rating and billing, web-based subscriber creation and account management, database PIN number creation and authentication, and customer data and billing and reporting features.

Benefits of Verscom Calling Card Solutions

Reduced Cost, Increased Flexibility: Eliminates expensive TDM-switches, reducing costs and giving service providers the flexibility to deploy services pervasively throughout their networks, without having to add expensive TDM facilities.

Extreme Scalability: Permits graceful, linear scaling to support up to millions of wireline and wireless subscribers and billions of minutes—with carrier-grade performance and reliability.

Rich Feature Set: Provides comprehensive feature set based on firmly established and broad market experience, as well as complete revenue and margin visibility and control to meet competitive and carrier challenges and opportunities.

Carrier-grade Availability: Delivers carrier-grade reliability and performance—with “five-nine” availability.

Sophisticated Billing Support: For Postpaid Calling Card services, SQL relational databases maintain CDRs that can be output to any billing system format, easing integration with legacy billing platforms. For Prepaid Calling Card services, accounts are debited during the call, eliminating the potential for fraud through real-time rating engine.

Rapid Customization: Service providers can modify call flows and prompts to meet specific market needs with drag-and-drop ease using the Service Creation Environment.

Wholesale Model: Supports multiple hosted value-added services running side-by-side on industry standard hardware.

Variations of PSTN Calling Services

Verscom PSTN Calling solution line comprises several services to meet different service providers’ needs:

• Prepaid Calling Cards
• Call-by-call Carrier Select
• Carrier Pre-Select
• Toll Free Numbers
• Premium Numbers
• Collect Call Service
• Callback Service
• Lightweight MVNO