Changing billing practices and role of Network edge Billing
Traditionally, service providers relied mainly upon price plan improvement and their core network assets as sources of competitive advantage. However, customer demands and competitive pressures are giving rise to flat-rate plans over complex billing plans. The emergence of IP based networks and services have moved customer expectations from basic requirements such as connectivity, to those provided by device manufacturers, application, and content providers. This is both an opportunity and a threat to the future revenues and has become a challenge to the Service Providers to develop sustainable revenue.
The existing pre-paid and post paid billing systems provide a solid foundation but are not capable to provide real time transaction management for large volume data. They are neither agile nor cost affective to support the change in business models and billing practices. Moreover they are inflexible and treat the account management, subscriber interaction and bill presentment processes in a uni - direction way. These systems were primarily architectured and designed for uncompressed voice, to support VPN and freefone to process high volumes of data in batch. The IN platform was re-engineered to suit the prepaid architecture, but it could not perform well for IP- based services due to their bursty nature and high volumes of transactions.
This shortcoming can be resolved by providing a dynamic and responsive interface between network, customer, and accounting data. This can be achieved by augmenting the existing systems with an agile, interactive and highly scalable infrastructure that will increase the intelligence of the application by moving the functions such as account management, subscriber interaction and usage details close to the customer i.e. to the network edge. This will enable them to personalize the services on their own and provide them accurate, current and instant access to the usage data, account balances, service bundles, advice-of-change notice, and promotional offers improving the customer experience. For SPS this will reduce customer care costs by moving these functions from back office to highly dynamic and responsive interface. This re-modeling will require introducing a new control layer which will touch the network layer and interact with the back office systems to unite the network and subscriber data. For ex: For P2P connection to control the session to manage traffic against an account balance, the capability to manage and control a subscriber session resides at the network edge interacting with devices, routers, and application servers etc. to extract relevant information.
