CONVERGENT BILLING: Generation Next

Service providers are engaged in a never-ending search for a more creative
offering, a smarter promotion and a better way of maintaining customer loyalty.
This is a difficult proposition in an industry where service offerings seem to
be limited only by the imagination. Capabilities are hard to comprehend and
customers are ruthless and unforgiving. The structure of the industry is still
dominated by large monopolistic operators, threatened by an increasing number of
entrepreneurial new entrants snapping at their heels. They will continue to grow
in numbers as technology has broadened the scope of potential voice, data and
entertainment service offerings, to the extent that the consumer appetite is
demanding the undeliverable.

What’s needed is a better and faster way to deploy a cutting-edge
convergent billing system. Building the network is time consuming, costly and
prone to legislative complexities, but most operators are confronting common
issues, and are competing on a level-playing field. Ultimately, competitive
advantage will be achieved by those who can best meet the challenge of how to
capture service usage transactions, or billable events, bill them effectively,
and respond to the market with flexible operation support systems.

Blueprint for the Next Generation

The service provider is consistently trying to tackle competition by
offering more creative promotions and tariffs and multi-service packages.
Strategically, those who offer multiple services have a distinct advantage,
particularly if they are capable of targeting discounts at one service based on
the usage of another. This helps to lock customers in, and reduces churn.
Formulating winning strategies is important. The application software, on the
other hand, must be capable of giving business managers the freedom of not
having to consider the implications of their billing systems in implementing
their strategic choices. Making changes to a complex variety of fast changing
tariffs has to be done without a marching army of scarce and expensive
resources. The tariffs must be easy to implement and quick to make operational.
There must be no constraints or limitations on the complexity or scope of the
tariffs, allowing the marketing department to do whatever it wants, whenever it
wants.

The Smart Solution
	A multi-operator regime has started
	Ratio of customers between basic service and other services is changing
	Convergent billing is the right solution for such an environment
	Billing software should track IP traffic of different types

Billing software should enable operators and service providers to track IP
traffic of different types. Consequently, service providers should be able to
charge their customers different tariffs for different types or classes of
service. Also, operators and service providers should be able to charge each
other for handling more valuable or less valuable traffic. The key is the
capture of data from IP networks via either packet tracking or agents on routers
and servers. This IP information can then be pooled together with other data
sources drawn from switched networks, value-added servers and content systems.
The billing system should determine service usage across multiple access and
content sources, and new and old technologies, before issuing the relevant bill
to the customer.

The demand for convergence and increasingly complex promotions and tariffs
for new services has created a demand for radically new billing solutions. A
decision by existing operators, to sink the significant cost of their existing
legacy systems will not be taken lightly. Decisions to move to next-generation
applications will be driven by a perceived impact to business growth and loss of
market share. In such a turbulent and fast changing industry, this is likely to
happen sooner rather then later.

Billing architecture has to be designed to adapt to the diverse strategic
manoeuvre of the organizations striving for competitive advantage. Those who
resist change may find it increasingly more difficult to respond to a
competitive maneuver.

Network service providers will be forced to offer their customers continuous,
new, innovative and flexible services. They will require correspondingly
flexible operations and billing systems in order to provision, monitor, manage
and bill for these services. While many companies are struggling to live up to
the billing demands of convergence and IP services, the future does look better.
New mediation software offer a solution to today’s and tomorrow’s billing
problems. Success and failure for many service providers will depend on how
successfully they deploy these.

Convergent Billing Software

Convergent billing is a carrier-grade billing, customer-care, mediation and
provisioning platform, that enables ISP, broadband, IP-based service providers,
ASPs, IDCs, Web and service portals, to manage and profit from application,
media, and communications services offered directly and through dealers,
franchisee and channel partners.

It enables service providers to increase market share and revenue through the
following principles:

l Any Time, Any
Service: This is seamless creation and deployment of new services, when needed–enabled
by a flexible plug-and-play architecture.

l Value-based
Billing: Empowering pricing based on any combination of consumer-driven pricing
matrices–enabled by a dynamic usage collection and a rapidly configurable
rating engine.

l Profitable
Revenue Management: Unique comprehensive capabilities to profitably manage
revenue interactions with service, content and channel partners.

Moreover, billing architecture should be multi-tier, i.e. plug-and-play, and
should have modular and reusable building blocks to reduce customization time
and associated costs. Billing should be distributed so that it can support
multiple configurations from the very basic to fault-tolerant data center, which
is fully redundant at each tier. Also, it should be scalable, support multiple
processes, and should be open, expandable and enhanceable.

Processes to be Accommodated

l Network
Elements

The usability and power of a billing solution depends on its ability to
interact with a variety of network elements. It should collect data and support
various network elements used in the convergence arena. To name a few, it should
generally have the categories, router, RAS, CMTS, switch, bandwidth and cache
management services, and media server.

l Mediation
and Provisioning

The mediation system in a billing solution needs to be a true
multi-vendor/multi-technology media platform. It needs to mediate call and usage
data from all kinds of equipment, including IP equipment. Events are collected
from gateways, routers, application servers, etc., and the process takes place
as follows:

Collection of usage data: An IP mediation system typically sits between the
IP infrastructure and the billing system and collects raw usage data from the
network elements

Service activation and provisioning: Activation is primarily about receiving
activation requests from order management systems, translating them into network
element commands and distributing these commands to network elements. When
activation is carried out in the network, the billing system should also be
notified. Deactivation, modification and cancellation are usually supported in
the same manner.

A single service activation system interfacing network elements in multiple
network technologies will simplify the implementation of support for bundled
services. For instance, a service package including high-speed Internet access,
plus one or several content services could then be handled via one activation
request. In addition to simplifying the ordering process, using a system of this
nature can significantly reduce cost for administration, operation, etc.

Once a system is in place, a service provider should be able to continuously
introduce new products into a system that are easily updated to support new
service logic and versions of network elements without operational disruptions.

l Authentication
and Access Authorization

This is based on parameters like restrictions and commitment periods, number
of services and service instances, and available funds and conditions.

Distributed architecture mediation and provisioning agents can be written in
C++, DCOM, CORBA and Java.

lProvisioning

Several processes are needed when providing a new user with a service. The
first step is to provision the physical and logical layers in order to give the
customer access to the network as well as set their account up in the inventory
system.

Once access has been provisioned, there are many other systems that might be
involved in the sub-process, e.g. inventories, testing, work management,
connectivity management, and activation. All internal systems need to be tightly
integrated with each other as well as seamlessly integrated with all outside
vendors’, advertisers’ and content providers’ systems. This, sometimes,
can be a challenging task.

Billing Platform

Ordering: A key factor for operators and service providers is to be first to
market with new and creative services. In order to sell new services, there has
to be a way for customers to order and pay for services. Ordering systems should
make it easy to define new services and service packages by combining access
with content services from numerous content service providers. It must be
possible to define different kinds of services and service packages in the same
system.

The second important step of the ordering process is the pre-qualification of
customers as they go through the sign-up process. This is usually done through
interaction with external order management and inventory systems.

Activation Rating: Rating is used for calculating usage charges (e.g.
traffic, content) and applying these charges to end-customers. Real-time rating
can be done, where the rating process is always-on and can process record files
immediately as they arrive. It should also include batch programs, reading event
records or Internet protocol data records, entering the charge information
automatically, for example, from a file containing information created in a
network environment.

The rating module functions as follows: The accounting agent reads
transaction log accounting agent, filters the required data, puts it into the
database and converts raw data into call data record (CDR), which then goes to
the billing agent. The billing agent applies usage pricing, talks to rate plan
and converts CDR to billable format record (BFR) and sends to settlement agent,
which applies discount and tax, talks to product management agent and converts
BFR to invoice record (IR), which is finally transferred to the invoice agent,
which generates the final invoice.

Revenue Management: The revenue management process starts with collecting
usage data and event-based information from a variety of network elements and
applications. All information needs to be processed and consolidated in
different ways before it is transferred to the rating process. The main task for
the rating process is to match usage data and events-based information with
defined services, tariff plans and subscription information.

Back Office: Back office should include modules like product management,
which bundles the product, service, packages and rate to offer the market. The
invoicing module consists of invoice engine, generation, formatting and
dispatching. It should support single invoice for multiple services, multiple
billing cycles and invoice-on-demand. The reseller management module should
handle resellers, dealers, franchises and channel partners. Tariff management
module specifies the amount to be charged per transaction. The collection and
payments module handles payments, account receivable, credit and debit node. It
also provides integration with financial systems and customer management–management
of customers, customer and SP relationships, customer hierarchies and customer
account.

Reports: The billing should support real-time OLAP reporting, based on
service provider requirements and should contain the APIs to customize the
reports on demand. Billing reports now become part of the following departments:

l Accounting

l Marketing and
product team

l Sales

l Helpdesk

l Management

l Network
engineers

l Customer
centric

Customer Care: Customer care has assumed significance importance in the
competitive service provision business. Every customer needs to be handled with
care. The software should support the customer care executives with knowledge
based call ticket management; call ticket forwarding to senior network people,
etc. Billing solution should be capable of handling the above listed features.

Very few billing software like JISP, Kinan, Portal and Am Docs are based on
the above framework and cater to above large-scale requirements. Needless to say
they are the world leaders supporting big corporates worldwide.

Nikhil Jain, COO Elitecore Technologies