Openet Research Confirms LTE Requires Advances in Operators’ Charging and Billing Systems
August 9, 2013 - Openet
DUBLIN, Ireland – August 9, 2013 – Openet, a global leader of real-time transaction management software and services, today revealed insights on charging and billing in today’s growing digital economy, gathered from 80 operators worldwide.
A key take away from the survey underscores the need to replace legacy IN prepaid charging and traditional billing, both aging systems that were designed for circuit switched voice services. As such, 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). The same goes for billing systems, with 87 percent of respondents indicating that most operators will replace existing billing solutions with real-time charging.
“The introduction of LTE is driving more sophisticated charging and billing requirements that legacy infrastructures were never designed to handle,” said Chris Hoover, VP Marketing at Openet. ”As they expand their service catalog to better serve customers and compete, operators know that modern, flexible, real-time charging is critical.”
The survey also illustrated:
- Real-time charging must support rapid time to market for new services, with 79% saying that a centralized offer catalog is important in accelerating time to market.
- A growing trend towards on-device interaction with subscribers that is managed by charging systems, with 74% saying that the top strategy for increasing ARPU and loyalty involves providing on device purchases and activation.
- The increasing role charging plays helping operators stay ahead of the competition with 79% saying that real-time charging enables service innovation.
To download Openet’s research report, Charging and Billing for the Digital Economy, click here.
Openet has also written a blog post discussing the report and highlighting key strategies to accelerate service innovation and increase ARPU, which you can read here.
