A key barrier to wider-scale mobile phone adoption in the youth market is parental concern over inappropriate use of the device.

With Openet’s Parental Controls solution, carriers can address this concern by introducing a range of services that enable parents to provide children the safety and convenience of wireless service while setting sensible boundaries for its use.
The Openet solution enables carriers to deploy a family-specific solution that empowers parents to:

• Set usage limits on a child's talk time.
• Limit phone usage by any combination of service, time-of-day, day-of-week, and contacts.
• Block calls and text messages to and from specific “disapproved” numbers.
• Limit the number of text messages and instant messages (IMs) made by the child.
• Impose a spending limit that stops service except to emergency numbers when the limit is reached.
• Impose spending limits by service, such as the amount the child may spend on ringtones and downloadable applications.
• Control the number and type of downloads made by the child.
• Control access to mobile Web sites, restricting access to inappropriate content.

In addition to control over inappropriate use of a mobile device, Openet’s Parental Controls solution enables families to provide mobile phones to their children without concern for out-of-control cell bills. For example, by including children as controlled pre-paid subscriptions within a parents’ postpaid account, parents can keep in touch with their children and keep control of their budget.

The flexibility and control provided by the parental control solution is an example of the next generation business models Openet’s Transactional Intelligence solutions make available to carriers. By providing dynamic business control over their networks, solutions built on FusionWorks enable carriers to move beyond simple “metering voice” to creating and adding value within a wide range of rich interactive services.