Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Electricity vendor uses GPRS for remote sales

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 09 Dec 2002 03:15:19 -0500

Electricity vendor uses GPRS for remote sales

12/09/2002

The  vending company, Actaris, has moved to a wireless vending solution running on MTN
South Africa’s GPRS network. The company expects to reduce its transaction costs by almost
80% while increasing efficiency through real-time exchanges. Actaris sells electricity on
behalf of most South African municipalities. Developed in conjunction with MTN, the new
system allows for cost effective on-line vending from remote sites.

According to Don Taylor, Technical Director of Actaris, previously most transactions
happened off-line with batch updates after hours. With the new system, the customer
supplies address or meter details, a request to buy electricity and pays for it. The
system confirms the customer’s details via a central database and issues a voucher. The
actual transaction and reconciliation now takes place in real time on a central processor.

“There was no real cost effective way to ensure continuous connectivity in the past and we
made use of radio-pads which were not only substantially more expensive, but also limited
in the amount of data that could be sent per transaction (packet size) as well as in
coverage. Because of MTNdataLive, we now have cost effective, continuous connectivity and
we estimate that transaction costs will come down from between 11c and 19c per transaction
to between 3c and 6c,” explained Taylor.

Piloted since July 2002 and launched commercially in October, the new system will ensure
the public of enhanced levels of service when buying prepaid electricity. Furthermore,
points-of-sale could be effortlessly enabled with value-added services to provide even
greater convenience.

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