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Billing for IMS
Operators must take a longer-term view of IMS, which should be seen as a foundation for future growth. And billing will play a significant role in its development, says Andreas Freund
It may seem that IMS has gone from being 'the next big thing' to the proverbial white elephant in just a few short years. The truth is, of course, somewhere in between, and there are signs that the European telecoms community is at last looking at the reality of IMS rather than simply believing the hype.
One popular misconception has been that IMS is the killer application itself rather than simply being the environment that will enable those killer applications to flourish. At its very simplest, IMS is nothing more than a roadmap and standard architecture that will allow fixed and mobile operators to provide new multimedia services.
These standards impose a logical architecture that makes it cost-effective for operators to rollout new and increasingly personalised services in their networks without disrupting existing services and capabilities. It also acts as the 'glue' that will combine the services, security, billing, interoperability, access and transport elements together to make such services more accessible for end-users and more profitable for carriers.
In an environment where 'data services' still usually means SMS for most mobile operators, the list of lucrative-sounding new services made possible by IMS has been one of the main reasons for the hype surrounding it: real-time video sharing (RTVS), personalised location and presence-based services, next-generation voice services (Push-to-Talk over cellular, mobile VoIP), multimedia conferencing (group chat/audio/web/video conferencing), multi-party gaming, personalised information channels and services. The list goes on.
As well as acting as an 'application enabler' for such IP-based multimedia services, IMS also promises to reduce time-to-market deployments, allowing new services to be tested, validated and launched into the market quicker and more cost effectively.
It will mark a departure from today's 'vertical' application platforms (or 'silos'), which provide dedicated functions to realise only one specific service, and herald a move to a reusable 'horizontal' service delivery platform that uses standardised functionalities and standardised external interfaces to deliver new services.
Lastly, IMS is seen as a tool that can provide the intelligence that can turn all the other current telecoms buzzwords into reality: acting as the evolutionary path towards all-IP networks and as an enabler of true convergence.
And all this in an architecture that remains open (3GPP standardised) but operator-centric, allowing operators to maintain complete control over their networks and, ultimately, their customers.
So why have the early trials of IMS not been as successful as many had hoped and why is IMS now being seen by some commentators as yet another expensive network upgrade with no return on investment in the short-term?
Now that the hype has made way for a more realistic outlook, operators must take a longer-term view of the IMS service roadmap. IMS must be seen as a foundation for future growth, rather than as a quick and easy answer to today's shrinking margins and increasingly commoditised telecoms market.
Billing a key factor
A fundamental area that needs to be addressed before the benefits of IMS are truly realised is billing, which will be a key factor in both enabling new services and protecting existing ones.
Today's billing deployments must be able to enable operators to evolve from today's circuit-switched and IN-based services to 'combinational' and all-IP based approaches. But if such solutions are not sufficiently 'future proof', convergent approaches to rating and charging will not be able to cope with the scalability needed to charge for existing services or the flexibility to handle the SIP-initiated sessions used in IMS.
In the mobile space, the way an operator bills for data and IP services is already evolving. There is no data price plan scenario that does not exist; all parameters and combinations are already in use. Moreover, billing is already rapidly moving from a pay-per-use model to the subscription-based 'all you can eat' bundling model that is commonplace in the fixed-line broadband world.
This transition is set to expedite once operators begin the migration towards IMS. When looking at billing in the IMS world, operators must ensure that it is both commercially viable and technically feasible.
The commercial aspect opens up whole new areas that billing will need to address. There will be opportunities to charge for new/enhanced services and for certain IMS enhanced attributes (e.g. presence, Quality of Service, grouping), but billing must also become more context/content sensitive and more 'personalised' – based on individual preferences and subscriptions, for example.
Billing must also break down the barriers between prepaid and postpaid by creating 'hybrid' online/offline billing models, offering, for example, prepaid options for postpaid customers and vice versa.
The migration to IMS is also likely to be driven by the corporate/enterprise market, where billing on the basis of Quality of Service, precedence/priority, reliability and delay are likely to be among the first IMS-enabled services.
However, neither the traditional, proprietary IN platforms (which also host prepaid rating functions) nor IT-based systems for batch-based post-paid billing offer sufficient flexibility or the required real-time performance to achieve such goals.
So what must a potentially convergent online charging layer provide in order to outperform the traditional approaches?
Sitting right between the existing network/signaling nodes and the IT environment, the Online Charging System (OCS) must enable seamless connectivity and ease of integration in both directions. In this respect the latest reference architectures as well as concrete charging protocols such as Diameter and well specified APIs (e.g. OSA/Parlay) are quickly gaining the status of 'new' de-facto standards. Furthermore flexible pricing and real-time charging mechanisms for event and session-based services have to bridge IN (circuit switched) and IP connectivity.
In order to truly support operators during their transition, new online charging layers must also be able to cope with traditional (IN-based) services, new hybrid services (combining circuit- and packet-switched sessions) as well as future all-IP/IMS offerings. Vendors who are merely repositioning their products will definitely fail to deliver these functionalities.
This raises the question of how long the transition from traditional billing to billing within the all-IP environment will take. The traditional systems will eventually be replaced, of course, but as they contribute the majority of revenue and profits they will need to remain in place for some time to come – at least until the all-IP/IMS systems prove that they can also provide the same levels of performance and stability as the existing IN platforms.
According to a well-known industry IMS maturity index, before true IMS is achieved – that is a fully packet orientated network that supports all IP applications – operators are likely to pass through at least four stages of evolution as systems migrate from legacy platforms and more SIP elements and IMS applications are introduced.
In terms of billing, converged Online Billing Systems with extensive real-time capabilities will be the answer for operators during this long transition and eventual evolution to a fully IMS environment.
Convergent billing has the ability to become a single technology platform which carries out the authorisation, authentication and accounting for both prepaid and postpaid accounts, and where the charging, rating and balance management is carried out online and in real-time.
For operators, therefore, enhanced charging and billing could ultimately work as both a differentiator and a stimulator for rollout of new services.
The time to think about converged, real-time billing is now!
Andreas Freund is Vice-President, Marketing, Orga Systems and can be contacted via: e-mail: AFreund@orga-systems.com www.orga-systems.com
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