The telecom domain is a very exciting area now a days. We now have everything from a simple phone line to mobile cellular phones. Today with so many offerings and bundling options, customers have the freedom to choose what they want and how they use the services. As an ISP it is important that regardless of the customer usage, every byte that travels through the network is accounted for. This is the importance of telecom billing BSS/OSS.
Today, there are nuances and challenges in almost every service that is delivered to the customer. Though the local calls are free for a flat monthly rate, your typical land line phone can offer other services too. Things like long distance calls, international calls, voice mail services, etc. Each of these has a different rate and billing structure. So your billing system needs to handle these correctly.
The more modern solutions, like cellular services, have even more complexities in offerings. In developed nations, the introduction of 3G services has meant that mobile networks are now being used for both voice and data services. The rates for both are different and so are their usages. In the developing nations, there are multiple short term and long term plans for plain 2G voice services too. The billing systems need to address all these variations.
It is clear that billing systems are great for telecom operators and they cover everything from traditional phone lines to the latest data plans on 3G mobile networks. But there are some costs and implementation considerations that one needs to be cognizant of while installing these systems. Everything from hardware to customer care services need to be looked at.
Getting good hardware fast enough and reliable enough to run good software is a great starting point. The next is the telecom billing System that will be tracking all the usages and billing accordingly. The third aspect is the billing cycle. While ideally it would great to have individual customer billing cycles, it may not be a practical solution. Most billing solutions adopt the batch processing approach; you determining the billing cycles is important.
The next is the bill distribution feature. For many customers, a paper bill is the preferred method of getting billing information. So you need to print and post the bills and that requires a good automated system to do these things, along with a reliable distribution network. After distributing the bills, you need an equally good system to collect the payments.
The final spoke in the billing solution wheel is the billing inquiry support system. Customers can be billed incorrectly due to errors from the ISP or software problems. Alternative, the customer can interpret the bills incorrectly. Whatever the problem, the issue need a resolution. The customer care department need to address these.
In conclusion, telecom OSS is critical to the success of ISPs. There are many aspects of billing solution deployment that require some planning and investments. If executed properly, telecom OSS can give great rewards.
Chrome Blog | Email this | Comments
![Click here to read If Apple Can't Deal With Facebook's "Onerous" Terms For Ping, Why Is It In Apple's Keynote Screenshots?](http://cache-02.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2010/09/160x120_thumb160x_40b73624ed47a836c6882a101c6c7e92.jpg "Click here to read If Apple Can't Deal With Facebook's "Onerous" Terms For Ping, Why Is It In Apple's Keynote Screenshots?")
