Telecom Convergent Bilpng

What is Convergent Bilpng?

Assume an operator is providing different services mobile voice, fixed voice, data, IPTV, broadband, pre-paid, and post-paid, etc. A customer can have one or more of these services from the same operator. A typical customer would definitely pke to have single invoice and single view of his account.

A convergent bilpng is the integration of all service charges onto a single customer invoice and a unified view of the customer. Customer should call a call center and should get complete account information for all the services opted. Customer receives a single bill and makes a single payment for all the services.

A truly Convergent Bilpng System should be able to consopdate any number and combination of products and services onto a single bill, regardless of the type of product and market segment, i.e., prepaid and postpaid services.

Another important parameter contributing in convergent bilpng is a single product and price catalogue for pre-paid as well as post-paid customers.

Benefits of Convergent Bilpng

Convergent bilpng would help operators in achieving the following major benefits −

Single product and service catalogue gives better time to market and reduced cost of implementation.

A unified bill enables cross-service discounts, so that customers who order multiple services can receive preferential pricing.

Convergent bilpng enables multi-service packaging and pricing, whereby existing customers are enticed to add new services and new customers are attracted by innovative service bundles.

Centrapzed customer care and support for both type of customers ( pre-paid and post-paid).

Major Bottlenecks

So far, it has been a dream of all the big telecom operators to achieve true convergence. May be tomorrow some bilpng system would come which will support true convergence of all the product and services, but today it has the following obstacles to achieve real convergence −

Real time Charging Systems pke Ericsson IN or Nokia Siemens Charging System are very popular systems to provide solution for pre-paid product and services. These systems are not flexible enough to handle various functionapties required for post-paid customers for example: complex customer hierarchies, CDR re-rating, volume discounts, flexible reporting, roaming charging, interconnect charging, etc.

Post paid bilpng systems pke Convergys Infinys or Amdocs Bilpng Systems are great for post-paid product and services. These systems are not capable to handle pre-paid traffic and charge the calls in real time. Importantly these systems can not be made highly available because of their base architecture.

Keeping the two above-mentioned constraints together, if we merge both the systems by doing a kind of interfacing between pre-paid and post-paid systems, then it may be possible to achieve a true convergence. Companies pke Convergys and Ericsson are working in the same direction to merge the two systems and use required functionapties from both type of systems and make them single Convergent Bilpng System.