Bango, Facebook Use Carrier Billing for Virtual Goods

Carrier billing is not new. It has been available since about 1983, as was made necessary by the breakup of the former monopoly AT&T into separately-owned and independent long distance and local businesses. Basically, local service providers needed a way to allow long distance carriers to bill local telephone service customers for their long distance calling. 

As a byproduct, carrier billing has been available to other third parties, and primarily has been used to support third party sales of content or virtual goods such as ringtones, songs and more recently, mobile apps or in-app products.  

Bango says it now is providing Facebook carrier billing services  in Germany, the United Kingdom and United States, and will be expanded to other countries during the remainder of 2012.

Bango now provides Facebook users the ability to easily purchase digital content without the use of premium text messaging services or credit cards. Instead, purchases appear on the mobile customer phone bills.