Sydney/Kuala Lumpur (March 15, 2012)CSG Systems International, Inc. (NASDAQ: CSGS), a global provider of software- and services-based business support solutions (BSS), today announced that the company has added two new clients on its convergent multi-service mediation solution, CSG Total Service Mediation (TSM), one in Australia and one in South East Asia.
Mobile operators in these highly competitive markets support customer bases that are already advanced users of mobile data. The advent of high speed broadband (HSPA) and LTE, supporting changing consumer demands and the growing needs of enterprise in the emerging digital economy, will dramatically increase usage and accelerate market penetration. CSG’s Total Service Mediation will allow these operators to meet the evolving demands of their markets while at the same time saving cost and gaining efficiencies through the consolidation of existing mediation systems onto a single, convergent platform, providing the agility and flexibility they need to change in line with new business models.
LTE and mediation
LTE creates specific challenges for mediation systems. The Offline Charging (OFCS) function (as defined by the 3GPP) takes a similar role to post-event mediation in 2G/3G networks, but with some significant differences. Where 2G/3G network elements would typically write call data records (CDRs) safely to local disk before they were collected, Offline Charging must be able to collect usage data from network elements in real time as “volatile” event messages and use these to construct meaningful charging information. Offline Charging must therefore be ‘always-available’, particularly for real-time correlation, and must be able to process the very large volumes of data – perhaps billions of events per day - that LTE has the potential to produce.
In functional terms, Offline Charging must support dynamic event- and session-based charging data collection, construction of complex charging records based on DIAMETER, and enrichment and formatting to meet the Charging Data Record format specified by the 3GPP. Application services which will run over LTE, such as the GSMA’s VoLTE (Voice over LTE) and evolved Rich Communications Suite, must be supported, in addition to basic data connection.
Why do carriers choose CSG for LTE deployments?
CSG leads the field in LTE mediation, supporting the world’s first launch of commercial LTE services and going on to deploy Total Service Mediation for LTE across that operator group.
Total Service Mediation supports many of the world’s largest carriers. Its ‘Billionaire’s Club’ of ten leading operators each process over a billion event data records (EDRs) per day, a total of over 32 billion events daily in total and over 6 trillion events per year, demonstrating the scale needed to meet the exponential volume growth in EDRs which LTE will trigger. And CSG provides this power at a competitive cost; its pioneering architecture allows horizontal scalability on low-cost commodity hardware, reducing the total cost of mediation ownership for some operators by a factor of 10 while delivering the processing efficiency which comes from a single platform.
According to Ian Watterson, CSG International’s Vice President & Managing Director Asia Pacific, “Digital content within the communications ecosystem is driving the most significant change to telco business models in recent history. Communication Service Providers everywhere are looking at improving customer experience and widening their range of value propositions, but at the same time must be cognizant of the need to process very significant volumes of data reliably and securely. With the assurance that huge volumes of EDRs are being accurately and reliably captured through TSM’s single integrated framework, operators can focus on building new multi-sided business models and rapidly rolling out new services to excite their customers.”
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