The Impact of 4G on BSS

The Impact of 4G on BSS

Martin Morgan, VP Marketing, OpenetNext Gen BSS Conference, London 8th October 2014

2w w w . o p e n e t . c o m© Copyright 2013 Openet – Company Confidential

For Use Under Non-Disclosure Only

• 4G – New services, new business models – more opportunities

• Impact on BSS• Transformation• Virtualization• Working with 3rd parties • What about legacy systems?

• Summing up

Agenda



• LTE: High speed and capacity driving data usage and innovation

• LTE users ~1.5GB of data per month= almost twice non-LTE users (GSMA, Nov 2013)

• LTE subscribers often exceed data limits• Innovative offers and business models

• LTE users ARPU higher than non-LTE users (GSMA, Nov 2013)

• Developing markets: 7-20 times• Developed markets: 10%-40%

LTE Drives New Revenue Opportunities

Source: Modibia / Informa “Understanding today’s smartphone user”, 2014

288 live LTE networks in 104 countries + 550 operators investing in 161 countries (GSA, May 2014)

64% of the world population to be covered by LTE in 2020 (GSMA)



New threats and opportunities require flexible real-time solutions

• Avoid relegation to dumb pipe by OTT Services

• Recover heavy network investment

• Monetize premium service offerings

• Capture revenue opportunity from new rapidly growing mobile applications (e.g. payments, advertising, in-app purchases)

• Manage massive and unstructured data sources – social media mashed up with EDR’s

BSS needs to enable:

• Rapid response to competitive threats from Google, Apple, Facebook, other OTT players

• Extract appropriate economics from heavy network users (such as Netflix, YouTube)

• New revenue sources to broaden base of customers and services

• Automated network functions (NFV / SDN) to reduce costs and make new service roll-outs fast and cheap

11

Service Providers Face an Increasingly Complex Environment



What Are Operators Saying……….



The Foundation for LTE Service Innovation: Evolving Legacy Business Support Systems (BSS)…

89%

11%

1. In your opinion, do you think that existing BSS limitations can delay new

product innovation and launches?

Yes No

23.8%

7.9%

30.2%

38.1%

2. If yes, in your experience what is the main reason for legacy BSS delaying product launches?

Systems are heavily reliant on vendors to set up new offers

New rate plans can be too complex

System integration work is too complex

No one single system to centrally develop, launch and manage of-fers

N/A (Answered "No" to question one)

“Charging & billing for the digital economy”, Survey of 80+ operators, Openet, 2013

1 & 2: Survey of 70+ operators, Openet, 2014

http://www.openet.com/chargingresearch



…Towards Real-time, Agile BSS

Charging & billing for the digital economy

”, Survey of 80+ operators, Openet, 2013

Telecoms.com Intelligence, “Operators’ BSS Strategies”,

global survey of 100+ operators



http://www.openet.com/bestofbreed

http://www.openet.com/bestofbreed



Operators Use Case – Real-Time Convergent Charging and Policy (TMF Survey June 2014)

TMF – Current and Forecast Use of Real-Time Convergent Charging and Policy ManagementSurvey of 67 operators June 2014. 33% working on OTT Collaboration now. Will rise to 68% in 2 years

Plans to Deploy Policy Use Cases

Question: Which of the following use cases will your company deploy in its network?



• More services

• In less time

LTE is Driving….

Shared dataApplication

service passesSponsored data

High speed roaming passes

Real-time context aware upsell

Upselling Add-Ons

VoLTE

Real-time dashboards & notifications

Wi-Fi offload & packaging

Speed-based offers



What’s the Impact on BSS?



Near infinite variety of devices

• Difficult to change• Proprietary• Built for “utility” style businesses

Billing System

INSystem

Service Catalog

Policy PCRF

Billing System

(Adjunct)

• Fragmented data• Expensive to maintain• Difficult to configure

World of content and services

Multiple access networks

12

Legacy BSS May Struggle……..



World of content and services

Multiple access networks

Near infinite variety of devices

Powerful benefits• Service differentiation• Monetization• Network optimization• Business intelligence• Business model evolution

Industry leading technology• Comprehensive functional library• Modular architecture• Flexible configuration• Virtualized deployment support

BSS Transformation

13

Open and Virtualized BSS – Enabling Transformation



• Operators will be “using virtualization to drive innovative service creation, especially the creation of services and apps that require time to market intervals of only days, even hours.”

• “Many operators view NFV as a key ingredient in their OSS/BSS transformation objectives, offering an escape from the legacy 12-24 month service creation cycles that handicap their long-term competitiveness”

Source: 2014 OSS/BSS Investment Trends: Top Operator Drivers and Priorities, Current Analysis

Business Drivers for BSS Virtualization



BSS Transformation and Virtualization



• Test new services with minimum risk/disruption (73.4% operators)• Easy to roll out or roll back services• Resources can easily be re-allocated• Easy to go from small scale trial to full scale production

• In-service upgrades and modifications: faster, minimum disruption

• Adoption of open standards with BSS software and NFV • Removes vendor lock-in and reduce needs for vendor specific skills • Simplifies integration of new components to the existing network

BSS: Learn Fast and Minimize Risks



• Open up BSS to 3rd parties (via APIs) => Multi-sided business models• Partners can directly build, launch, maintain own offers• E.g. MVNOs, OTTs, content partners, enterprise customers, IoT providers

Virtualized BSS can Provide the Open Platform to Drive Partner Business Models



• Partners have secure access to operator’s BSS to configure their offers, pricing, QoS and promotions

• Automated process and reduces strain on operator’s IT team

• Partners can also use operator supplied customer intelligence to refine offers

Opening Up Offer Catalog to Third Parties



Protect Legacy BSS Investment

• Mobile operators want to protect legacy BSS investments made over many years

• Operators want to squeeze the last drop of ROI out of legacy BSS investments

• This approach can be to the detriment of project timelines and stymie real innovation



• Why would an operator do this? • Reduce time to market as services down to a matter of weeks• Introduce new services such as RCS without legacy systems acting as a bottleneck• Protect Legacy BSS investment while having the flexibility to scale up as required. • Where appropriate adjunct systems can interface to existing BSS

Virtualized & Non-Virtualized BSS side by side?



• VoLTE requires co-ordination across policy & charging control elements to define application level QoS with flexible charging to zero rate VoLTE control traffic, support legacy voice tariffs and new flexible bundled propositions

• Heavy Reading 2014 operator survey – over 30% of policy systems may need upgrading to handle VoLTE and some may need to be replaced

Example of Adjunct Systems - VoLTE



Policy VoLTE: Option to run as Adjunct



• 4G is driving more services that need to be delivered in less time

• Many legacy systems are not up to job

• BSS transformation is happening – driven by move to IP, faster networks, more services

• Open systems and virtualization can speed up transformation process

• Virtualization enables adjunct approach to be accelerated while protecting legacy investment

Summing Up

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Technology

The Impact of 4G on BSS