Look no further if your business needs a reliable online charging system to implement prepaid billing services. An innovative and dependable Online Charging System (OCS) has been created by Caretel. In the telecom billing community, OCS is also known as Real Time charging system or Prepaid Billing System. Prepaid mobile plans often permit SIM card usage for both telephony and mobile data. Prepaid services require the client to pay a sum equal to the given plan in advance of using the services. The service won’t work until a prepaid payment (or top-up) has been made. To establish and provide prepaid services, the OCS system is a must.
How does a Real Time charging system work?
A telecom operator’s
network component communicates with the Online Charging System. This networking
component consists of some software and some hardware. The Telecom Operators
utilize the Universal Gateway (or a UGW provided by several providers) in
numerous instances. The Online Charging System receives the use request made by
the subscribers, which is captured by the UGW.
Telecom companies may cut
down on revenue loss in customer management and invoicing by implementing
convergent pricing. Additionally, members may manage their expenditures with
it.
The following traits apply
to convergent charging systems:
· Support for different service kinds, including as voice, data, multimedia, and content.
· support for service bundling
· Ability to make a single bill and statement for all communications services, including fixed, mobile, internet, and TV.
To handle novel and
developing 5G monetization use cases, convergent charging also combines online
and offline charging methods.
Utilising cutting-edge technology and expanding architecture
The Online Charging
System’s true advantage is that it is a contemporary piece of scalable, robust,
and dependable software. The most recent technological advancements were used
in its implementation, including a horizontally scalable collection of
listeners positioned behind a load balancer and a microservices architecture. A
telecom service provider may then handle millions of CDRs (Call Data Records)
over the protocol with ease. Fault tolerance and high availability have been
included in the system.
The Online Charging System’s Uptime Guarantee
In a prepaid billing
system, the two most crucial features are scalability and resilience. Consider
the consequences if the OCS system stops answering network communications.
Thousands of telecom customers’ access to the service would be impacted since
every usage would effectively be delayed for authorization on the network
component (such as the UGW or Universal Gateway).
The OCS system’s (also
known as the prepaid billing system’s) uptime guarantee is crucial. The system
must provide a high availability feature to guarantee this. This implies that a
backup server must be ready to handle communications if the primary server
becomes inaccessible for any reason (e.g., hardware or software issues).
It should be able to
accommodate an increasing number of users to the network without affecting
network response times to maintain the scalability of the OCS system. The
network component’s ability to determine whether or not service consumption may
continue is mostly dependent on the billing and pricing mechanism.
An increase in subscribers
is good news for the company, but it might also quickly translate into bad news
if it starts to negatively impact the service provided to current clients. In
the 4G and 5G era, it is anticipated that service interruptions will be minimal
and that consumption speeds—particularly for mobile data—will be sustained at
acceptable levels even with the addition of more users.
Ready for the commercialization of 5G?
The growth of mobile
networks from 4G to 5G to 5G SA (stand-alone) has generated considerable
financial constraints on Communication Service Providers (CSPs). As a result,
they look for novel approaches to increase the value of their assets and earn a
return on investment.
The development of 5G: new sources of income
Furthermore, 5G is
transforming the telecom sector with its novel use cases, which range from
consumer cloud gaming to business machine remote control. These use cases must
be made available through new value-driven revenue models in addition to
session- and volume-based goods to realize their full commercial potential.
convergent charging system: Unlocking 5G Monetization Opportunities
To handle novel and developing 5G monetization use cases, convergent charging combines online and offline charging technologies. The charge function (CHF), which was introduced by 3GPP, gathers all network and service consumption data.
The 5G charging function,
or 5G CHF, makes payments possible and lets CSPs develop new services and
offers that can be swiftly and effectively distributed to customers. It also
determines how much a user should be charged for the services they utilize.
Convergent charging for all applications of 5G.
To fully realize the
financial potential of 5G, the charging solution must have a high degree of
flexibility to accommodate evolving rating and pricing schemes. Quality of
service, slices, API events, and streams from IoT devices are examples of
triggers for charging; in other words, the new 5G charging system should be
able to “Charge Anything.” Furthermore, the new charging method
should make it easier and more automated to create new products and offers for
the 5G ecosystem. Time to market may be accelerated by using no-code or
low-code monetization technologies to accelerate the offer generation process.
In summary
An essential component of
our revenue management package, the convergent charging engine enables
intricate usage-to-payment business processes and is highly adaptable to new
services, business models, and use cases. It also allows complicated real-time
pricing based on any combination of variables.
With a single convergent
platform, the system employs an agnostic approach for network technologies,
telecom and non-telecom goods, client kinds, business models, and any line of
business.
This real-time charging
platform is cloud-native, highly efficient, and dynamically scalable. It
completely complies with 3GPP architecture and can be easily expanded with
value-added features to enhance the user experience.
In today’s world of real time charging solution, the Online Charging System is crucial, and the Convergent Billing Platform is the perfect choice for implementing your prepaid billing.