The Internet promises to revolutionize the way communications service providers do business. As margins for traditional services like long-distance telephony diminish due to intense competition, changing regulation, new business models, evolving technologies and new market entrants, offering Internet Protocol IP-based services, represents a logical step for communications service providers.
As a result, a great deal of attention has been devoted to next-generation services, such as videoconferencing and Voice over Internet Protocol VoIP. However, less consideration is given to the challenges implicit in collecting revenue generated by these new offerings. PricewaterhouseCoopers has found that many telecom companies leak between 2%-5% of their revenue, a large portion of which is recoverable. However,...