Unified platform
The need for more control and intelligence seems to have already triggered a change in the competitive landscape, as talk is already surfacing about the integration of real-time billing and policy management in a unified platform. Most of this talk is coming from billing vendors, which are keen to enable operators to leverage the overlap between the real-time charging, rating and billing solutions they offer, and the policy enforcement capabilities often associated with the network vendors or policy management vendors.
Indeed, there is overlap, as both realms require detailed subscriber profiles, as well as dynamic responses to customer behavior that help operators build offers and bundles that cater to specific subscriber usage habits or preferences.
Convergent billing still seems to be a long way off judging by the number of separate prepaid and postpaid billing systems in existence. But that might not be as big of an issue for Asian operators that offer primarily prepaid. What's more of an issue is the impending need for policy servers, which Infonetics predicts is about a year away, as the majority of broadband operators implementing tiered services will need PCRF (policy and charging rules function from 3GPP releases 8 and 9) capabilities and network databases within that time frame.
"In Asia we see significant uptake of services, and as bandwidth demand increases, the need to implement PCRF and network databases will grow," said Tekelec's Fuller. He noted that in places where ARPU is lower, the idea of offering lots of services cheaply will bring usage up quickly.
"Perhaps that will mean India and other emerging markets will adopt more broadly defined tiered pricing at a much faster rate than will the mature markets," he said.
The speed at which Asian markets are growing has some billing vendors believing that a smoother transition to more sophisticated tiers and policy controls can be achieved by converging specialized policy management with real-time billing platforms.
It doesn't take much imagination to see how policy management solutions from players like Bridgewater, Tekelec/Camiant, Openet, Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia Siemens have some synergies with capabilities from convergent billers with real-time charging platforms such as Amdocs, Comarch, Comverse, Convergys, Highdeal, Intec, LHS and Redknee.
"Operators need infrastructure capable of receiving orders from charging systems and other elements, which in turn should trigger reductions or increases in bandwidth according to pre-established rules," explained Guy Hilton, manager or product marketing for Amdocs' revenue management practice, which offers convergent charging that includes a policy server for policy management capabilities.