I have worked with several prospective MVNO projects. What I have found is that often the proposition isn’t strong enough to warrant a fully fledged “operator” relationship with consumers. However, perhaps there is something in the business plan that makes sense as a mobile offering and could potentially make money. There are other would-be “mobile entrepreneurs” out there who have potentially strong ideas for making money from mobile consumers, but they are stuck with either the limited prospects of using premium SMS for charging or trying to enter a more comprehensive commercial partnership directly with the operator, which ain’t easy, especially for “risky” ventures.

A common problem is that various mobile ideas require the use of data transport that isn’t going to be cheap for the consumer. It seems that what we need is a mechanism to control the charging to a particular URL (or IP address/port) so that a business could “pay” for access to the URL on behalf of the consumers who access it. Moreover, the operator could provide an “in-band” charging mechanism, such as WAP billing, to allow the business to charge consumers via their phone bills without the clunky PSMS process.

Various commercial models are possible. The operator could revenue share with the business in return for free access to a certain end-point (e.g. URL) and set thresholds on the required return versus level of subsidy etc. It is also possible, using IP filtering, to charge differently for different types of traffic. For example, a social networking application might involve the use of exchanging pictures say. The exchange of a picture could be charged for by the operator and they share the revenue. The other, non-picture, traffic could be free of charge.

Alternatively, an entirely reverse-charged model might suit those businesses who don’t want to revenue share with the operator, or who can’t because there aren’t any chargeable transactions with the consumer anyhow. An advertising model is one example.
I guess that this model is possible for aggregators who could enter a wholesale arrangement with the operators and then implement the intelligent charging and revenue sharing services themselves.