Improving 5G billing with AI and container technologies
Annie Turner
Improving 5G billing with AI and container technologies
China Unicom is championing a proof of concept (PoC) Catalyst project, 5G cloud & AI convergence of BOSS, to create a single, cloud native billing system that covers the whole of China and opens up the full potential of 5G for consumers, business customers and ecosystem partners.
5G will enable a diverse range of services, from massive IoT connectivity to connected vehicles, and smart cities. China Unicom's billing system processes 40 billion
4G call bills per
day and it is expected that 5G will drive the volume up by
about 10 times
to reach 800 billion daily. This is because there will be more connected devices
(9 to 10 billion)
than there are people on the planet.
This will result in an estimated increase of at least 20 to 30 times for the computing, storage, and network resources needed to support the associated growth in billing. The investment of hardware and the maintenance cost of software will also increase.
Per province billing
In China, most operators have a charging and billing system per province, but this approach has multiple limitations and cannot support billing needs in the 5G era. Duplicating charging and billing systems in each province is expensive and it is hard to manage new software releases and maintain applications, nor is it easily scalable.
It is also difficult to pull data from across provinces to see the bigger picture and help communication service providers (CSPs) innovate and implement new services and business models. This is critical because 5G’s attributes such as network slicing and low latency are expected to play a big part in attracting customers to new use cases, helping CSPs monetize 5G.
The present billing system affects current services as well as future ones because, for example, if people move to a different area, they cannot take their service with them. Also, many families want one account that covers their children’s bills when they are studying away from home and maybe grandparents.
A more flexible billing system could make services more attractive: For instance, the CSP could send customers alerts if they are running up a big bill watching TV on their mobile (which is increasingly popular in China) or gaming, and recommend a deal tailored to their needs.
Likewise, the fragmented billing system is not helpful for enterprises with operations in more than one province – including to understand and control their spending.
In short, with the globalization of business, consumers want more cross-regional services, and consumers and businesses alike are quick to identify such products when they come onto the market.
A single, cloud-native solution
China Unicom sees a single, cloud-native charging and billing system for the whole of China as essential to the success of 5G and remaining competitive in the market. A new distributed, cloud-based billing system would allow rapid deployment with flexible scheduling and on-demand scalability. It could handle massive volumes of 5G bills and greatly shorten the delivery time of new products.
China Unicom began work on a single containerized billing infrastructure in 2020. To further the work, it is championing the TM Forum Catalyst PoC project,
5G cloud and AI convergence of BOSS
, to reinvent billing to meet the needs of 5G, using AI and container technologies, and to help it work with partners to deliver more value-add services and products.
In the design and development phases of the new solution, the Catalyst team is referencing TM Forum’s
(ODA) and, based on its function and requirement principles, decoupled the charging system into five modules. They are production, core commerce management, party payment, engagement management, and intelligence management. Catalyst participant China Academy for Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) helped design the high-level architecture and
the decoupling modules, and carried out project verification.
The aim of decoupling functions, modularizing them, and using Open APIs to support Agile development is to create win-win relationships with business partners in diversified 5G scenarios.
The Catalyst also used the Forum’s
Business Process Framework (eTOM)
in the design of the promotion module that will recommend products to customers, and the charging and billing modules conform to the Framework. The flow charts in the Framework were also used to guide the entire design.
Working together
The Catalyst is also supported by participant Beijing Tianyuan DIC Information Technology which
supplies the message control module, link module and charging system
. Inspur Communication Information Systems
provides the production module servers in the cloud-native environment.
SI-TECH Information Technology
is responsible for AI strategy within the Catalyst, carrying out matching and compute within an intelligent management module, and combining data about 5G products offered by multiple companies with user profiling and users habits.
China Unicom also wants to use AI to attract new groups of customers, identify and fix problems before they impact users, and reduce the number of disputes.
In parallel with the work ongoing in the Catalyst, China Unicom is at the staging phase of its actual deployment, running promotions and carrying out validation, using outcomes from the Catalyst. It is scheduled to go live early in 2022. China Unicom thinks the output of this Catalyst has the potential to make a real breakthrough for its business, monetizing 5G with new and improved services, and better quality of service.
for more information from the team.
