How Oracle is Helping CSPs Charge for 5G Services in Real-time

As communications service providers race to deploy new lightning-fast 5G services, they must be able to accurately authorize and respond to charging requests in milliseconds.

Oracle’s 5G-ready cloud-native Converged Charging System was designed to meet this need by providing fast online and offline charging for any service or payment model. That means service providers can charge users in real-time for rich 5G communications and digital lifestyle offers. This can range from charging for VR cloud gaming to a video health check with a medical professional.

As part of Oracle Communications monetization portfolio, the Converged Charging System provides real-time transaction processing using Oracle Coherence—the industry-leading in-memory data grid technology. This enables the system to operate at extremely high performance and speed by collocating data with the rating and balance management processing in one centralized location—eliminating time moving data back and forth. While designed to scale with the needs of 5G, the system also works with 2G, 3G, and 4G, helping to ensure charging reliability regardless of the network.

“5G will significantly transform operations, services, business models and industries,” said Chantel Cary, senior analyst, Omdia. “To capitalize on new opportunities, service providers will need a next-generation monetization solution that can scale, operate in real-time, and provide flexible pricing models.”

As 5G advancements continue to foster diverse use cases with massive amounts of data, such as industrial automation, robotic surgery, and connected vehicles, service providers will need to be prepared for rapidly evolving charging models. The Oracle Converged Charging System supports any payment type—prepaid, post-paid, and hybrid—and can rate and charge for any attribute or metric, such as bandwidth or data volume. This allows service providers to create personalized offers, plans, bundles, and subscriptions for any mobile or IoT-enabled device. In addition to consumer-focused business models, the system is built to support charging for enterprise businesses, governments and B2B2X (business-to-business to any number of end-users) use cases with very large and complex hierarchies, such as charging across multiple departments or pay structures.

“Our carrier-grade Oracle Converged Charging System is uniquely built to help service providers monetize 5G and deliver digital innovation,” said Jason Rutherford, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Communications-Applications. “Service providers benefit from fully integrated real-time charging and billing and end-to-end revenue management, which helps deliver a superior customer experience with less risk and cost.”

The Converged Charging System provides high availability deployment options powered by advanced Oracle replication technology, including an “active-active mode”, which uniquely allows the charging grid to be replicated across multiple geographically distributed data centers. In this mode, all sites are running all the time, and in the event of an unplanned outage, the system helps ensure service continuity without revenue loss. The system is architected to be fully cloud native, providing orchestrated containers that equip service providers with the scalability and efficiency to quickly capitalize on new 5G opportunities.

Built with TM Forum aligned Open APIs and 5G Standalone and Non-Standalone Architecture protocol support, the Oracle Converged Charging System can be deployed alongside Oracle Communications Converged Policy to enable a 3GPP standards-compliant Policy and Charging Control Framework. This framework is part of Oracle Communications’ 5G portfolio, which also includes 5G cloud native core network solutions, digital experience, network slice orchestration, service fulfilment and partner ecosystem enablement.