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.