France Standardizes Active Customer Definition

The French telecoms regulator has announced that it is making some changes to how it counts subscriber numbers in its quarterly reports. From now on, it will take into consideration the fact that certain operators customers, who use the prepaid formula, are not active. The method for calculating the number of active prepaid clients proposed jointly by the three mobile operators and approved by ART is now as follows: "active prepaid clients are those who have made or received a call during the last three months. Only phone calls are counted, whether free or paid. SMS are not included in the calculation".

This evolution, which has been presented recently to the "Commission Consultative des Radiocommunications" (CCR), is part of the move to harmonise the definition of active prepaid clients at the European level. Given the time required for the operators to process this information, the Observatory for the first quarter 2002 will be published as soon as the required elements are received, during the second half of April.

As incoming calls also count towards keeping a customer classified as "active", it would be cynical to suggest that the networks would set up an automated calling system to phone each customer just before the three month limit is up to try and keep subscriber numbers healthy.'"

Posted to the site on 15th April 2002