Evolution of the Next Generation Telecom Billing System

The billing system is no longer a subsidiary of the entire telecom business in the traditional sense. With the rapid development of the telecom business, it has become the source and basis for the telecom operation Support System (OSS) to achieve operational income. The accuracy and timeliness of the telecom billing system are directly related to the Customer Service Quality and the income of telecom operators. As the competition in the telecom market changes from "Network Competition" to "customer competition", the billing system has become one of the core competitiveness of telecom operators. The telecom billing system has gone through three historical stages: the first stage is "offline tape billing ". Billing Data goes through a process from vswitch to tape to computer, with poor real-time performance. The second stage is "online real-time billing", which achieves strong real-time performance and greatly improves the anti-fraud capability of operators. The third stage is "integrated billing ". With the help of Operation Support System (OSS) experts, the telecom industry can create new revenues through new technologies and services such as VoIP, multimedia Short Messages (MMS), and 3G. Integrated billing simplifies settlement between carriers and customers, as well as between carriers and partners. It can seamlessly support various network traffic on a single platform, regardless of whether they come from voice, data, or IP/next-generation services. In a content-based service era, traditional data processing and billing platforms have been added to a new and important innovation element: Real-Time billing platforms. Next we will discuss the evolution of the billing system from the context of the evolution of the entire business support system. As a matter of fact, the goal of evolution is to cancel isolated and closed billing systems and replace them with a set of billing meta services that are fully adaptive and can be evolved independently. The old billing system is facing the following challenges: the rapid development of business objects and the rapid expansion of the number, as well as significant technological innovation. The diversity of business makes the number of business objects to be processed increase dramatically. At the same time, the continuous growth of users is also evident. A system with hundreds of millions of documents processed daily has become a basic requirement for processing. Traditionally, the technical method to solve the centralized massive data billing basically adopts the file-based operation object, and increases the batch processing capability through serial logic and line processing, however, such an approach is increasingly inadequate. These many contradictions are constantly squeezing the weak architecture of the old billing system. The Savvy operator has begun to realize that a bill is not only a receipt, but also a key channel for customer service. However, if you want it to take this responsibility, it is imperative to upgrade and improve the billing system. First, data services pose a major challenge to traditional billing systems. What we are facing now is not just a voice service. A data processing process contains a variety of different types of transmission streams, but different types of transmission streams need to be charged in different ways. Some new billing Methods Collect the usage information of different types of transmission streams from the network, and then provide these more subtle billing information to the billing system for the final bill. At the same time, the operator can now get a detailed and accurate understanding of the customer's usage of the service, and thus make the operator's favorite CRM for many years truly. In addition, the increasing popularity of pre-paid billing methods in the data business field is also promoting the evolution of billing software. In the past, pre-paid billing methods used only to prevent fraud have become the mainstream. To this end, although many early billing vendors had separate pre-paid and post-paid platforms, many vendors can now provide a single solution to integrate the two. The ultimate goal of integrated billing is to use a unified technology to simplify the settlement process and process all the data generated on the increasingly complex network. This is also a complicated concept that is hard to achieve. In today's OSS market, data processing and billing platforms play an important role in supporting the interconnection and billing between networks. Lack of effective inter-network interconnection management methods can cause serious economic losses. From another perspective, the dependency between operators is getting higher and higher, if there is no effective interconnection between networks, the service may not be activated. In particular, for new operators, interconnection protocols are even more important. Currently, the telecom market is moving towards content-based services, and the cooperation between different content providers is becoming more and more extensive. Therefore, the inter-network billing, data processing, and real-time billing platforms are increasingly important to the billing process. The integrated data processing technology can collect information about customers after providing services to customers. The real-time Billing Platform ensures that content services are put into application for network identification. It can accurately and in real time verify the detailed information of consumer payments to ensure that each partner receives the expected income. In the content billing model, if a carrier wants to explore its revenue potential and ensure customer satisfaction, it must coordinate the integrated data processing and real-time Billing Platform. The new generation of billing has been switched from a passive background system ?? That is, after all activities on the network are completed, the work starts ?? It has become a more active role in providing services, gaining benefits from services, reducing costs, and improving operational efficiency. Carriers, content providers, and distributors need to invest in such systems to effectively compete in the ever-changing market. In short, the telecom billing system is no longer a passive background system, and its position as the core competitiveness of the entire telecom industry is becoming increasingly consolidated and has become the soul of the entire telecom system. It can effectively provide services, reduce operation costs, and improve operation efficiency. Carriers, content providers, and distributors must attach sufficient importance to them in order to gain a favorable position in the competition. (People's post and telecommunications News)