Airtel India: Charging and policy solution for 5G
Airtel India consolidated its charging solution for its 350M subscribers, expanding the strong presence of Ericsson Charging in its network, enabling Airtel India with a future-proof solution ready for 5G offerings.
Highlights
Airtel India partnered with Ericsson to consolidate its online charging solutions. In this case, Airtel India expanded its existing integrated policy and charging solution by replacing legacy online charging systems and migrating 70M customers to Ericsson Charging solution. This results in consolidating its OCS to Ericsson Charging, simplifying its architecture and lowering overall TCO.
"The main business objective was to have a future proof solution so that we can have our network function ready for 5G …and our other main reason was that we have more harmonized and simplified operations."
- Rashim Kapoor, SVP, Core Network, Airtel
The challenge
By running multiple Online Charging Systems (OCS) in its networks, Airtel India faced several business challenges, such as: long lead time for new product launches, complexity on channels integration, and inconsistent end customer experience.
Operationally, this setup led to an increase of the overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), hampered process efficiency for new product launch and resulted in complex lifecycle management of the existing solutions.
To overcome those challenges, and toward achieving its key business drivers, Airtel India partnered with Ericsson to expand the existing Ericsson Charging footprint by consolidating online charging solutions, aiming to reduce overall TCO and offer the customers in India a consistent experience.
Airtel's key business drivers
The solution
In this partnership with Airtel India, Ericsson implemented its integrated policy and charging solution, consolidating all other OCS by migrating more than 70M customers to Ericsson Charging, making it a sole solution serving 350M+ customers across India.
The offered solution provides Airtel India a scalable and converged policy and charging solution benefiting from the pre-integration of Ericsson Charging and Ericsson Policy portfolio , supported with Ericsson Mediation.
Ericsson Charging is a low risk but effective route to capture and secure revenue streams for Airtel India, it is a scalable, flexible solution, enabling real-time convergent charging, and supporting rapid time to revenue in the market. Ericsson Mediation plays a key role in Airtel India network for data processing, it is responsible to filter out, aggregate, and transform the data as per the format required by the data consumers.
The unified architecture enabled Airtel India to consolidate its product offerings. It integrates seamlessly with digital channels, reduces operational efforts for products configuration and testing, and provides differentiated charging over 3GPP Ro interface for VoLTE calls.
The result
Addressing IT and business agility, the consolidation of online charging solutions in Ericsson Charging empowered Airtel India to launch new products with shorter time to market, less configuration effort and reduced testing. The implemented solution provides a single system for offer creation and user communication leading to simplified end to end provisioning and data consistency.
The project took place through the pandemic period adding more pressure to have meticulous planning and delivery. Both Airtel and Ericsson teams did a tremendous job to guarantee flawless execution, delivering a first of kind global migration of 70M subscribers to Ericsson Charging with no issues through the whole migration process.
The unified architecture across India is the main foundation that enables Airtel India to plan for future 5G services implementation.
