[Survey]: LTE Drives Majority of Operators to Replace Billing and Real-Time Charging Systems

   
A new survey (by Openet, based on 80 operators) finds that "70 percent of operators surveyed said that IN based charging systems will be replaced within the next four years with real-time online charging systems (OCS) .. 87 percent of respondents indicating that most operators will replace existing billing solutions with real-time charging .. 79% saying that real-time charging enables service innovation"

  

Source: Openet

"As operators continuingly seek to create new revenue streams and attract customers, the rise of realtime charging and its integration with policy control has seen many innovative services and charging models introduced. Figure 8 highlights key use cases that operators are currently offering or planning to offer. It reveals that the most popular use cases are multi-device plans and data passes (e.g. 50MB for 1 day) which more than 90% of the operators are either offering or would like to offer. However, data passes appear to be the most widely offered type of services, already launched by 62% of the operators, whilst only 30% of them are currently offering multi-device plans. The next most popular use cases are Shared data (e.g. Family plans) and Speed tiers which 87% of the operators surveyed have launched or would like to launch".

"Cloud technology is growing and when it comes to charging and billing, it seems to have a bright future, with over 83% of operators thinking that it will become widely used in the next three years .. 37%, predicting that they will use a combination of both cloud and on premise systems".

See "Openet Research Confirms LTE Requires Advances in Operators’ Charging and Billing Systems" - here report (here, registration required)