10 minute read
5G MONETISATION
New systems for new 5G opportunities
Thanks to its low latency and high speed, 5G is enabling and supporting applications across many different verticals, not just in telecoms. However, to enable 5G to be monetised, operators need to invest in their IT alongside their major operational technology (OT) network investments in 5G, writes Antony Savvas.
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Only by having IT that is flexible and automated, can they participate in the truly analytics-enabled, data-led and real-time decision-making that new 5G and IoT applications demand. With this is mind, how can communications service providers (CSPs) carve out a bigger role in the 5G-enabled world, rather than just providing the network? And how will they enable the network slicing, edge intelligence and real-time decision-making, to support both their customers and their own operations, to achieve that wider aim of having a bigger role?
“5G is not just about the one killer app, but about a multitude of new apps and devices,” says Mats Arvedson, business development manager and driver of 5G consumer propositions at Ericsson. “We know that consumers want innovative services attached to their 5G subscriptions, but service providers’ core strengths lie within connectivity, not application development. Service providers therefore need to find partnerships that utilise both the great capabilities of 5G, but also the innovation power of the wider ecosystem.”
For these partnerships to be successful in bringing new 5G applications to consumers, says Arvedson, the network must be ready to handle them. “When we talk about 5G use cases, they’re often highperformance, low-latency applications. Technology to support these must provide a set of features that
Tilly Gilbert
STL Partners
Frank Healy
Openet
address the challenges of delivering mobile data in a speedy and reliable way, matching the requirement of lag-sensitive apps such as mobile gaming, or augmented and virtual reality.”
Arvedson adds: “With 5G, there is no longer a onesize-fits-all mentality. Instead, services are delivered and charged on a micro-level. 5G will allow for instant adaptations of data plans to better fit consumers’ needs, and technologies such as network slicing will allow for truly customised services that deliver according to their expectations.”
OT and IT together
The nature of changing customer requirements, particularly in light of 5G massive machine-type communications (mMTC), means operational technology (OT) and IT data must increasingly be handled together, says telecoms consulting firm STL Partners.
To unlock decision intelligence in real-time and handle the convergence of IT and OT data, says STL, policy management must evolve to handle 5G network slicing, and rating and charging must also evolve to handle machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. In addition, customer monetisation engagement points need to be improved to get the best out of 5G investments.
Tilly Gilbert, a senior consultant at STL, says: “Telecoms operators and others within the ecosystem should consider key practical steps to reach their monetisation targets. They should not wait for 5G to explore the value they can unlock with low latency data processing. There are plenty of opportunities both in terms of internal efficiencies and revenue generation that can be achieved with existing network infrastructure, and moving early will ensure a strong platform for when 5G-enabled services are widely created.”
Gilbert says CSPs should also consider moving to cloud-native networks and IT. By doing this, IT and networks can interface more closely, and silos can be broken down between the network and the monetisation engine supporting it.
“A cloud-native architecture can also better support microservices, critical to fostering agility and achieving faster time to market,” Gilbert says.
Like Ericsson’s Arvedson, app development is also key for Gilbert. She says: “Ensure that solutions can support agile product development and innovation, since we are not seeing one obvious killer 5G use case – there are many – and operators need to be able to innovate faster and more efficiently than before to capitalise on these opportunities.”
Billing
To make the most out of what they’re delivering to customers in the 5G space, providers must also deploy a dynamic and agile business support system (BSS), to control charging and billing flows to effectively monetise the value that 5G brings to consumers.
Data platform provider VoltDB says: “Shrewd telco providers see 5G as an opportunity to supercharge
their business support systems, by bolstering their billing processes and policy functions to maximise monetisation opportunities.”
But, STL’s Gilbert points out: “The reality today is that many operators’ BSS systems rely upon architecture that is over ten years old, which cannot support the highly automated, highly flexible environment that is now required.”
Previously, a mediation layer has enabled information, such as call data, to be imported into a billing system. Going forward, such data types will increasingly need to be aggregated and processed together, in real-time. “It is only through doing this for themselves, with data from their IT and network domains, that operators will gain the skills and technology they need, and prove their pedigree to enterprises in other industries undergoing similar journeys,” Gilbert says. “This will enable operators to be perceived as valuable partners and enablers for industrial IoT solutions, converging IT and OT data within the manufacturing industry, for instance.”
Israel Mor, a strategic product manager at Ericsson, says: “Service providers will decide which role they will play in the 5G ecosystem – network developer, service enabler or service creator. Each role demands its own level of investment, while promising more revenue opportunities as CSPs go up the value chain. And they can even play several roles at the same time, depending on the use cases and capabilities needed.
“But there is one thing that is common for all, and that is the foundation that opens the door of BSS to 5G monetisation: the charging layer,” he says.
For every session, message or call there is a trigger to the charging function, even if this is a post-paid event that just needs to be summarised in the customer invoice. The function is responsible for generating all CDRs (call detail records), or in turn for triggering the online charging system (OCS) or converged charging system (CCS) for real-time charging.
“Charging plays a critical role in the integration of new 5G networks with business support systems, but that’s only half the story,” Mor says. “In order to guarantee standards and to secure quick access to new services and parameters, the charging function must be flexible enough to allow protocol updates and information normalisation, preferably through a graphical user interface that simplifies the operations, as these tasks are usually quite complex.”
The ability to easily include a new 5G parameter in an existing service-based interface integration, and then to pull it up from that network interface all the way to the product catalogue will make or break use cases, Mor says.
Frank Healy, the product marketing director at Amdocs subsidiary Openet, says of the new BSS requirements: “A quantum shift in network-driven intelligence evolves from harnessing the real-time flow of transactions and statistics from the network functions. It also evolves by using analytics to selfadapt and respond to these metrics intelligently. Integrated functions bound together, incorporating network, IT and business system functionality, can deliver a seamless and self-managed service flow. It is therefore critical that service providers ensure network functions in 5G are tightly integrated into their wider BSS tools.”
This will not only ease the management of 5G services but also allow service providers to be more agile when it comes to service deployment and the creation of new revenue streams. Healy adds: “More use cases equal more revenue opportunities, but service providers cannot expect to capitalise by applying 4G methodologies and technology processes. 5G requires a new architectural design and providers will have to ensure they have the right systems and tools, and adopt the right approaches to make the most of 5G’s capabilities.”
Data processing
To move from post event analytics to real-time processing and decisioning, operators will need to replace batch processing of data with the use of stream processing to improve data management, says STL. Stream processing means that decisions are made as input data is ingested, rather than waiting for a batch of data to be stored before a query is run.
“Stream processing is not only about low latency decision-making, it can also help telcos to manage the vast quantities of data they are handling,” says STL, and can also reduce the cost of storing data, ensuring it does not build up into something slow, unwieldy and frankly useless in the world of 5G.” As well as saving on storage costs, more efficient data processing can also generate more sales and reduce losses from fraud.
VoltDB says systems must be updated. It says: “By moving away from legacy relational database management systems (RDBMS) and NoSQL database solutions, and embracing modern BSS solutions that run on data platforms designed specifically for the 5G- and IoT-driven era, you are able to efficiently and accurately charge millions of customers simultaneously, even though all of them are interacting with different streaming services.”
Customer value management
Customers increasingly expect personalised experiences, and often they have to be delivered within milliseconds, if the CSP is to benefit from greater revenue returns. 5G networks and the technologies wrapped around them can make it possible to take a proactive approach to customer value management and serve up personalised offers in real-time, based on pre-defined event triggers. According to research, says VoltDB, CSPs have a mere 250 milliseconds to make a targeted offer during a real-time customer engagement. Capitalising on these opportunities is only possible when the contextual decisioning part occurs within ten milliseconds of the beginning of the interaction – and this is only possible with a highvelocity decisioning engine, adds VoltDB.
Fraud prevention
As technology continues to evolve, fraudulent activities become increasingly complex, making them that much harder to catch without the right tools in place.
“To prevent fraud in the 5G era, telcos can no longer afford to wait for information to travel to a data warehouse for analysis, because the fraudsters will already have won by then,” VoltDB says. “Instead, analysis needs to happen rapidly – within ten milliseconds – which again, requires real-time decisioning intelligence.”
The good news is that thanks to 5G connectivity and machine learning, it’s possible for CSPs to analyse millions of individual events each second, automatically identify suspicious behaviour, and block fraudulent calls before a connection occurs. And, since behavioural algorithms can continuously learn what bad actors look like, this enables CSPs to become increasingly more adept at preventing fraud over time.
Edge computing
As organisations increasingly invest in IoT devices and infrastructures, the need for a corresponding edge computing infrastructure to support them becomes a necessity. Organisations need to make sure they have the infrastructure needed to process, analyse and execute on data within the aforementioned ten milliseconds of an event, which is where 5G edge technology enters the arena.
VoltDB says: “CSPs can’t afford to wait for data to travel anywhere. If it’s not acted upon immediately, it’ll lose all of its value by the time it gets to your data lake or data warehouse, which is why workloads need to be captured, stored and analysed at the network edge, or whichever location is closest to the point of data ingestion.”
The need for edge deployments is illustrated by analyst house Gartner, which estimates that 75% of data will be generated and processed at the edge by 2025, in response to the widespread take up of IoT networks and the ramping up of 5G connectivity.
Three takeaways
• Database and stream processing must be brought together, at the edge, to address the entire event data management cycle from ingestion to storage to decision.
• CSPs must apply sophisticated rules, algorithms and machine learning models to massive streams of event data, applying that analysis to help them make decisions.
• All of the above needs to be applied in real-time – within ten milliseconds – both consistently and accurately.
