How BSS can enable and empower 5G monetization

5G monetization is at the spotlight. Research such as “Harnessing the 5G consumer potential” and “5G and the Enterprise opportunity” detail the opportunities lying in different markets. At different implementation speeds, addressable markets and industries applications, they show that there is a huge new revenue potential for operators in the long run.  New business models in different use cases can be found in “Getting creative with 5G business models”, that shows how AR/VR gaming, FWA (Fixed Wireless Access) and 3D video experiences could be delivered through B2C, B2B and B2B2X engagement models. To address those use cases, markets and industries and deliver on the 5G promises – such as enhanced network speeds and bandwidth, decreased latency, guaranteed quality of service, network reliability and flexible offers – service providers must address their BSS evolution together with their 5G implementations, or risk  not being able to monetize those new use cases once they become a reality. 5G monetization is one of the superpowers that will allow operators to deliver on their 5G promises on day one.

Starting from the start: addressing BSS architectural evolution

To unlock the full potential of 5G monetization, service providers need to address evolution of their telecom BSS from different perspectives:

• Network integrations: The standards for the new 5G Core define a 5G Converged Charging System (CCS), containing a 5G Charging function (CHF), which provides converged charging and spending limit controls in the new service-based architecture that is introduced with 5G Core. Both online and offline flows trigger the CHF, which in turn will either trigger the OCS (online charging system) for online rating or generated an unrated EDR (event data record) for offline rating.
• Service orchestration, fulfillment and service assurance: The introduction of network slices and more enterprise services demand more complex and tighter orchestration and fulfillment of services, to make sure that products, bundles or offers, including own or third-party products, are negotiated, ordered and activated as soon as customers need them. As more critical services make use of 5G networks, SLAs (service-level agreements) definition, implementation and enforcement become key to ensure contracted capabilities are met.
• Exposure: With new business models and industries connected through the 5G ecosystem operators must ensure that their BSS capabilities are exposed through standard TMF Open APIs to anyone that needs to securely consume them. Consumer of BSS APIs could be other BSS applications, surrounding layers such as OSS and Core network or third parties and partners that enrich 5G services with their own capabilities.
• Cloud architecture: The efficiency, automation, scalability and resiliency needed by 5G networks and services demand an updated software architecture that accounts for cloud implementations of BSS, being it at private, public or hybrid cloud. l I explained it in more details in my article on cloud BSS.

It is not expected that service providers will completelyoverhaul  existing BSS in all of these areas at the same time. New 5G revenues will not all be available on day one, they will come and grow as different markets and industries evolve. Operators need to take into account their specific situation, market opportunities, wanted position in the 5G value chain and evolution maturity to decide where their evolution will start and how this step-by-step journey will look like. For example, while an operator in South Korea may start with a cloud-based CHF service-based interface along a catalog-driven enterprise order care and fulfillment system to enable new enterprise use cases another one in Germany may focus on a stepwise cloud adoption of the whole BSS to have a more efficient system for consumer FWA services.

What is common among them all is that the target is the same – build an end-to-end 5G ecosystem that fosters the launch of new services. Encourage some of these new services to stick, and revenue will flow accordingly. The whole process should be cost efficient, intelligent and agile to mitigate the risks associated with launching a new service, minimizing impacts to the financials if a service doesn’t take off as hoped. Let´s take a look at a scenario where a service provider addresses augmented reality gaming through intelligent 5G network operations.

The AR gaming use case and intelligent operations

With 5G Core, BSS and OSS tightly integrated, the time has come to onboard a new partner: a cloud gaming company that wants to provide AR gaming services to the operator´s subscribers. They need a dedicated network slice and guaranteed quality of service for the gaming traffic. In an intelligent, fully automated network the partner can request their network slice and define their SLAs through a digital channel. Once this order is received by BSS, it decomposes it in several sub-orders, such as the creation and provisioning of the network slice through the OSS. At the same time the defined SLAs are automatically configured in the network slice and assurance starts to monitor the defined indicators right away. All this happens with no human intervention.

The operator also makes use of their catalog-driven architecture to define, in one place, the product offer that its subscribers will purchase in order to be onboarded on the partner´s network slice. This offer is automatically propagated to all necessary systems, from online charging to CRM and digital channels to be consumed right away. It is also exposed, through an API, to the partner, that may package it along other benefits before selling it to subscribers. Then the operator can make use of intelligent recommendations to target the new offer to specific subscribers based on their usage patterns and behavior –  discussed  in my previous blog post How contextual marketing can help you monetize 5G use cases.

Finally, once a user purchases the new plan (s)he is dynamically onboarded in the network slice, again without any actual hands touching the system. The partner will be able to see in real time the network status and quality of service information for each subscriber and may decide to quickly take actions or run promotions based on actual network information. The BSS cloud architecture guarantees that different applications may scale up or down based on real-time resources utilization. In what is called a closed-loop approach, all information about purchases, products and network usage and financial results, among others, are fed back into the system and used as inputs for network and catalog planning.

Curious to see this network of the future running today?