Billing for 3G/UMTS mobile services
Dr Dirk Lukas, senior consultant, BSS Strategy, E-Plus, and head of 3G billing project, GBA, examines existing and developing applications and technologies for 3G/UMTS and explores how to prepare now for billing these new services.
Third Generation mobile services and applications promise everything from lightning fast Internet access to enhanced services such as mobile video-on-demand whilst roaming.
Sounds great, but how do you bill for them? These enhanced wireless services present a whole new set of billing challenges.
Imagine an evening in a conference hotel somewhere in Asia. Our end user, let’s call her Helen, may do some or all of the following from her hotel. She answers her e-mails, adding comments to some design concepts that arrived as video clips; she sends a digital photo of the view from her hotel to her mother on the other side of the globe; she makes three business phone calls without video. Having finished this session but still using her personal communicator, Helen looks for interesting shows in town, then a restaurant, and books four places for both the next evening. Next she calls her husband and the children in France, enabling a video link, so that she can see how they are getting on. Some time later she watches a movie, again on her personal communicator, interrupting herself once to look at a financial news alert.
The real challenge for billing is encapsulated in this scenario. Helen has used her personal communicator for both business and pleasure. The business pieces may well be charged and paid for by her company, as part of their ‘data’ account. The pleasure pieces however, which involved ordering theatre tickets, a video conferencing session and a movie, will need to be dealt with differently.
For instance, if Helen wants to watch a movie on her 3G/UMTS terminal, the system may need to check that the selected movie has a viewing certificate in the country where she is currently. Then the billing system may have to account for several things, including:
• Any royalties due on content delivered from another part of the world;
• Whether there is a fee payable by the customer;
• Whether a commission is payable to the visited network, as a promotion from the movie owner;
• The movie may be sponsored or supported by advertising, in which case it might be delivered free to the customer and the revenue collected from another source.
After her trip, Helen will probably want to see an itemised bill, either presented on her personal communicator or posted through her letterbox, which shows she has used these services and details the commissions payable.
How to deal with this vision
Once E-Plus started preparing for the challenge of such a vision, we realised we needed answers to the following questions:
1. How should we classify 3G/UMTS services and applications?
2. Who do we need to partner with in order to provide these services?
3. How will these services work with regard to tariffs, pricing and consolidation?
4. What difficulties may occur, and how can we solve them?
To answer the last three questions would mean revising our business support system requirements. This quickly led to the last and most important question:
5. From an operator’s point of view, which business support architecture would best fulfil these requirements?
Basic classification of service types
The vast range of service types currently being proposed will be enabled or enhanced by 3G mobile technologies such as GPRS, EDGE and UMTS. These service types are likely to come down to some basic classifications. Figure 1 gives a few examples for consideration.
Tariff models will differ for each of these classes, but will also vary depending on the different partners.
Partners and relationships
A telecoms operator is likely to need several partners in order to provide these different kinds of 3G/UMTS services, and for many these relationships already exist. Some of these will remain unchanged, at least from the business support point of view, for instance relationships with fraud organisations, credit card companies and banks. However, many existing relationships will need to adapt, like those with interconnect partners, roaming partners, independent service providers and resellers - not to mention relationships with corporate or residential customers.
Furthermore some new partnerships will emerge, especially with content providers. They may create their own content or act as brokers, but in the future we will see a huge mass of different players entering the new market.
Since companies often play more than one role in the market, it becomes much easier if we focus on functions or entities. There are three different entities that crop up in nearly every 3G/UMTS business case.
• The Transport Provider (TP) building and maintaining a communications network such as GSM, GPRS, UMTS, or IP;
• The Service Provider (SP), who could be a cellular service provider and/or an Internet service provider. Let’s call them a multimedia Service Provider (SP);
• The Content Provider (CP), responsible for both the content brought into the business and applications providing this content.
• Last but not least – the most important entity of all is the end user or customer.
Two impor-tant assum-ptions are worth mention-ing with regard to relationships between the different entities:
1. There will be only one interface to the customer and only one bill to the customer!
The main contractual link will be between a customer and his multimedia Service Provider. To facilitate the placement of content, a multimedia Content Provider will have a very close relationship with one or more multimedia Service Providers. The question, therefore, becomes who controls the delivery channel to the customer, and who supports the customer regarding billing and customer care?
2. There will be no relationship between the entity operating the network (TP) and the customer!
Since there is no necessity in today’s mobile telecomm-unication business why should it happen in the UMTS business? Furthermore, since a Transport Provider has no relationship with the customer there is also no relationship between Transport Provider and Content Provider.
Whenever TP, SP, or CP are mentioned it is in connection with providing a certain function. It should be remembered that a company can play one or more of these roles; establishing itself in a niche, providing a complete service, or doing something in between. If relationships exist, they can be of an internal or external nature depending on the entities involved.
In our opinion, a telecom operator – as one kind of company – has two options.
1. Offering access to a third party’s content
In this scenario the telecom operator will have four main kinds of business to support with his billing and management systems.
a) Interconnection and roaming;
b) Customer administration and billing, and other customer relationship management (CRM) functionality;
c) Commission on the content for providing access;
d) Billing and maybe collection on behalf of the Content Provider. This is not only a customer facing function, but also provides a service to the Content Provider.
2. Producing and offering own branded content.
In this option, interconnection and roaming remain, as does the Customer Relationship Management requirements. In addition the telecom operator has to handle:
e) Sourcing and collecting the content from elsewhere, then paying for it;
f) Offering advertising to third parties, which requires presenting another bill to obtain revenue.
This brief analysis has highlighted six different business functions including billing that a telecoms operator needs to consider before making a decision on how to proceed.
Challenges for the billing industry
It has become imperative for the billing industry to gain consensus on how future billing models will handle the increased challenge of services that are developed and launched within weeks, rather than months or years.
Here are just some of the main difficulties arising at the moment, and their possible solutions.
Identifying content from packets
How to identify a call or video, movie or game within a stream of packets, and how to produce a CDR out of the packet stream is a major concern.
Because the methodology behind IP networks is to treat all traffic as data sent in a stream of packets, this impedes the process of identifying the ‘call’ or ‘video’, ‘movie’ or ‘game’ and producing a CDR. Voice-over-IP providers have found a solution for voice traffic: they implemented a pseudo-interconnection between two circuit switched networks based on airtime and access fee, and they use the Internet mainly for free. This solution is not realistic for voice or other real-time traffic within 3G/UMTS services, and it is just not feasible for data or other non-real-time traffic with a guaranteed QoS.
Operators need standardised business interfaces on services and applications to allow identification of the content and its value.
Interconnection between circuit switched and packet switched networks
A challenge arises when an IP and a non-IP network interconnect. This point has already become an important issue when implementing HSCSD (High-Speed Circuit Switched Data) on a GSM network and interconnecting with the Internet, and has yet to be solved to everybody’s satisfaction.
There are several groups working on IP-PSTN interaction; for instance the 3G.IP group and a new consortium known as the International Softswitch Consortium.
Meanwhile, in the wireless world, groups such as the Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) Forum are working on methodologies for delivering Internet functionality to wireless devices.
Operators need standardised business interfaces on legacy circuit, packet switched and UMTS to allow comparison of similar events at a business level, for instance billing or customer care. Billing records for the same event created on both a circuit switched network and a packet switched network must contain compatible information on the event that occurred.
Translating a ‘CDR’
Having solved the actual delivery of products from one environment to another, the question will still remain: how can a ‘CDR’ from a packet network be effectively translated onto a circuit switch, and vice versa?
Pricing 3G/UMTS services
Tariffing between operators will mean data traffic accounting, and thus will be measured as bandwidth or megabits. However, because of the number of players and the number of interconnection points, there is a necessity for standardised accounting methods, and for the possible extension of standards that already exist within the GSM and data environments.
Services for business and pleasure
Business users like Helen may use UMTS services for both business and pleasure, which will mean identifying how that service is being used. Once identification has occurred, then the tariffing will change between bandwidth usage (paid for by the company) and a personal video conferencing session, theatre tickets or a movie.
Variable Quality of Service (QoS)
UMTS will be capable of supporting a variable QoS. This means that as network congestion fluctuates, different periods of a single connection to a service will incur different tariffs. Whilst these fluctuations are unlikely to affect low data rate services such as voice, they will become more prevalent for higher data rate services such as Internet access. This variable QoS means that the process of tariffing will be far more complex for UMTS services than it is currently for voice on existing networks. It is therefore of paramount importance to develop an effective way of pricing services relative to their bandwidth, quality and latency demands. Since the user may require a certain QoS, which UMTS cannot guarantee, and furthermore the user cannot measure or prove the delivered QoS, one solution might be a discount on missing QoS without any contractual impact, giving operators the opportunity to show confidence in their QoS.
System challenges
Some general challenges for the billing system can be summarised as follows:
• It will need to be capable of handling complex ‘content’ and ‘product’ charging;
• It will need to be capable of handling very large volumes of small transactions or events (e.g. payment by each SMS, or e-mail sent);
• It will need to be able to present the bill through WAP/VHE interfaces;
• Billing information presented this way will need to be supported the same way, via WAP or VHE self-care;
• It will need to handle payments initiated through WAP/UMTS interfaces, with options for payment from communications accounts, credit cards or direct from bank accounts;
• It will need to interface to a settlement system capable of handling many, varied and complex transactions;
• It will need to interface to a customer relationship management system, which will keep and maintain the customer relevant data;
• It will need to fit like a module instead of a monolith into the operator’s business support architecture.
As mentioned previously, there are several different forums working on the various elements necessary to determine the billing system of the future. One of the latest initiatives is being undertaken by a working group set up by the Global Billing Association (GBA) to develop a billing test bed for content, initially using a GPRS network. E-Plus will also be hosting an educational workshop this Spring on billing for content, in conjunction with the GBA.
The billing community as a whole needs to make a commitment to work together to resolve some of these issues, and give time and resources to these various initiatives. Otherwise, the next generation of services will be upon us before we have all the pieces of the puzzle in place.
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