Ericsson leads the convergent charging market in 2012, ahead of Huawei.
As the ramp-up in data traffic continues to strain the network, operators are looking to better correlate the value of resources consumed to the price charged, said Infonetics Research said in its latest Convergent Charging Software and Services report.
The research agency noted that new service and payment models such as hybrid accounts, shared data plans, content packages, and location-based pricing all represent ways for operators to differentiate themselves while generating more revenue from their networks. Bottleneck is frequently their legacy billing and charging environments.
The convergent charging market, including software and services, rose 42 percent to under $1.7 billion in 2012.
Market research firm Infonetics Research expects the growth to continue in 2013. Its report tracks charging software built to handle multiple dimensions of convergence, including convergence across payment methods, service types and access networks, along with related consulting, integration, and managed services.
Shira Levine, directing analyst for service enablement and subscriber intelligence at Infonetics Research, noticed slow growth in Western Europe last year. There was a strong momentum in the rest of Europe, Latin America, and developed countries in Asia Pacific.
Full-scale billing transformation projects are few.
Majority of deployments are occurring as a result of adjunct or overlay projects.
Ericsson, which leads the global convergent charging market, signed several deals in 2012. This year, one of the main deals for Ericsson was with Bharti Airtel. Ericsson has deployed Ericsson’s Mobile Broadband Charging solution and has modernized its Pre-paid/ IN solution for Airtel subscribers across 23 circles in India.
As a part of the deal with Airtel, Ericsson’s multi service Mobile Broadband Charging (MBC) suite will allow prepaid customers to have personalized profile based data charging plans.
Prepaid customers will be able to customise their data plans across mobility, fixed line and broadband by cross bundling across multiple domains – 2G, 3G, 4G/LTE & Wi-Fi. It will also offer flexible multi service charging in geographical redundant mode to the world’s largest prepaid base.
Infonetics anticipates more replacement activity in the convergent charging space as operators rethink their existing solutions, swapping them out or augmenting them with systems that are more feature-rich, flexible, and scalable.
