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    Convergent billing – Converging on the future

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    Many operators have announced plans to combine wireless solutions with traditional fixed telecoms and broadband offerings. In supporting these initiatives a significant amount of emphasis has been placed by observers on the underlying network technologies – WiFi, 3G cellular, Bluetooth, SIP, hybrids like UMA (unlicenced mobile access) and next-generation carrier core network architectures, like IMS. However, until now, there has been very little focus on the challenges of billing, provisioning and supporting FMC services

    Given that traditional fixed and mobile services have been tariffed and marketed very differently, the "behind-the-scenes practicalities" of creating converged services required foresight and flexibility on the part of the service provider and, equally importantly, their back-office infrastructure.
    In particular, FMC services have needed significant new approaches for billing and OSS, with suppliers needing to demonstrate the ability to cover a wide range of potential future business models.
    In an ideal world, creating, deploying, billing and managing FMC services would be (relatively) simple. Converged operators would all run both mobile and fixed networks, offering a homogeneous array of services. Uniform and ubiquitous use of technologies like IMS and SIP would permit the creation of "seamless" services, without the need for complex legacy integration between different service providers or technical domains. Billing and customer care would be predictable, and structured around a finite and controllable set of variables.

    Unfortunately, the real world is much messier.
    Some operators started from a fixed point of being fixed-only or mobile-only. Local competition and regulatory environments resulted in layering of incumbent operators, broadband service providers, MVNOs, 3G-only network operators, managed service providers and retailers. Each of these have different technological preferences and deployment roadmaps. Third-party VoIP providers and content/service firms abound. Corporate users still like the familiarity of PBXs or the flexibility and value-add of new IP-PBXs. New access networks like WiFi and WiMAX add additional disruption to FMC value chains.

    The net result is that converged service providers now have to contend with a unprecedented number of 'moving parts'. Yet many FMC providers do not own the complete set of underlying networks, especially on a broad geographic basis. Instead, most will work with partners to develop joint services.WiFi aggregators, in-building coverage specialists, corporate managed service providers and 3rd-party content and outsourced service providers may also be involved in many FMC business models.

    This mandates that operators pay close attention to the underlying contractual details made between each other and partners. This goes far beyond traditional interconnect, and will have to cover myriad new business relationships.

    Providing this type of offer means that FMC operators need to ensure that their back-office systems are capable of dealing with the necessary subtleties to enable effective wholesale billing and revenue-sharing.

    The enterprise
    This is an area that poses particular new complexities for mobile operators. Although in theory they canoffer outright "fixed-mobile substitution", especially to SMEs, it is clear that services need far greater richness to compete with fixed systems like PBXs (eg contact centre functionality, free/low-cost "on-net" calls between employees, call transfer, integration with CRM and salesforce IT systems etc).

    Apart from anything else, most corporates own and operate extensive and high-performance IP-based data networks, and these are already proving a strong platform for integration of fixed voice solutions like IP-PBXs. At the same time, increasing numbers of mobile workers are driving up businesses' dependence on cellular and other wireless technologies. Consequently, there is already a large and growing demand to tie mobility-related voice and data communications more tightly to the IT and fixed-network domain.

    Given that few cellular service providers have strong enterprise network/PBX skills, there is a need for many to partner, either with fixed operators, systems integrators or managed service providers. Unlike residential offerings, corporate FMC is likely to involve the internal IT/telecoms department in order to deliver complex communications services. The boundary between "public" and "private" brings a new dimension, which underscores the value-chain complexities discussed in the previous section, especially as the "business model" used in corporate private networks is usually oriented around free "on-net" calls.

    Once again, this puts traditional operator back-office processes under considerable stress. Billing and contractual revenue-sharing with partners will have to go far beyond simple interconnect reconciliation. For example, a company may expect its cellular tariffs to zero-rate in-building "local" calls, or discount ones made by employees from their homes.

    Larger enterprises may also look towards web-based policy management interfaces for their employees' mobility usage. If carriers are unable to support this type of tariff structure, it will provide further impetus for the enterprise-based solutions which attempt to minimise service expenditure, through the use of "plain vanilla" IP pipes and least-cost routing intelligence. Operators have a narrow window of opportunity to prove the value of integrated services through flexible and sensible pricing, billing, ordering, support and other customer-facing processes.

    From the foregoing sections, it should be clear that billing, customer interface and the management of multi-provider joint services are fundamental underpinnings for commercial FMC services.
    There are huge differences between traditional business models in the fixed and mobile worlds. Combining these into commercial FMC tariffs and acceptable customer experiences has been complicated, and has needed several rounds of trial-and-error to perfect. Platform flexibility has been and will be critical.

    Customer vs. Network-centric
    Having asserted that billing and associated OSS functions will be of paramount importance to the success of FMC services, it is important to delve deeper into the most appropriate way of delivering those capabilities. This battle relates to the "location" of the business logic, controlling what services a subscriber can access, under what conditions and to what tariff and credit terms. This has ended being more "IT-centric" than "network-centric".

    In this context, IT-centric billing involves putting the "customer's view" at the centre of the operator's system, and enabling a variety of services and features to feed into that hub, even if those services are only "loosely coupled" at a network level. This approach makes it easier to consolidate the various services the customer is signed up for, enable fully online customer management, such as service, configuration and authorisation features, and bring in assorted 3rd-party offerings and marketing and bundling approaches. The level of integration work required is dependent on the openness of current networks, and the tools to interface separately with each of the underlying technology/network platforms. It may also make it difficult for the platform to have complete and uniform access to real-time operational data, such as fault status or forecast availability of capacity, as the different networks' sub-systems may have differing abilities to provide such information or functionality.
    By contrast, the network-centric approach involves unifying the various network and device platforms as far as possible, in order to gain process efficiencies and enable the billing/OSS function to "see and control" everything. However, this is only feasible for those networks that can be easily integrated, and, as previously discussed, the FMC world is still quite far from a homogeneous IMS/IP/SIP Utopia, in which everything involved in a hybrid service shares a set of common technical standards.
    While certain "point" FMC services may be more suited to this network-centric approach, especially where a single operator controls the whole system, there are likely to be many more instances where this level of proscriptive service provision is simply not possible.

    An example of appropriate service for a network-centric approach might be a technically-rich variant of in-building wireless, connecting a PBX to a local softswitch to enable "on-net" calls to be routed/billed separately. Some of the UMA-style services extending GSM signalling over residential broadband, from a cellular network core, may also fall into this category. Here, voice remains the main application.

    Conversely, the types of content-oriented service described above (eggaming or music, spanning PC and mobile phone), are heavily oriented around portals and service delivery platforms, with highly-fluid revenue-sharing and partnering arrangements, which cannot be "hard-wired" into the network. As applications and devices move towards SIP and standardised open interfaces, easier creation and deployment of new forms of interactive service will also tend to favour the IT-centric approach.
    Lastly, complex multi-operator value chains have placed a premium on those billing architectures that enable rigorous cross-checking of wholesale/accounting data, as well as facilitating the development of new types of multi-party contractual relationship. Margins are driven by the ability to negotiate favourable contracts with "suppliers" (ie other operators/service providers) – and the ability for software infrastructure to support and bill for those contracts appropriately.

    Carriers need to recognise this, and raise their collective game, to make their own services more accessible and attractive than roll-your-own DIY alternatives. To avoid IP-based commoditisation, they need to deliver customers far greater value in terms of application packaging, service and convenience. Again, billing and customer-centric capabilities come to the fore.