MobileFlows is now fully compliant with T-Mobile 3PG
Posted by Mark Lederhos on Wed, May 05, 2010 @ 07:13 AM
T-Mobile 3PG (Third Party Gateway) is a new billing platform for premium SMS billing. The changes involve an extended set of parameters to be sent to (or received from) T-Mobile as part of premium billing processes.
Although adding support for 3PG is not a trivial task, most of our customers did not have to do anything and the changes were seamless and transparent. In other cases, customers only needed to make very minor changes as required.
The major benefits for providers is a more reliable billing process including a feature known as "two-phase" - in this scenario, T-Mobile ensures the end-user receives the content and the merchant receives the funds ... great idea, but to be honest, we are not so sure about how practical this feature is for many types of content and campaigns.
Other benefits include support for subscription refund management and supposed better support for pre-paid subscribers.
At the moment, 3PG changes are for premium campaigns only - however, we have reason to beleive these changes may impact standard rate campaigns in the future - something we think would be a big mistake and hopefully T-Mobile will come to their senses before making a final decision on this!