Viewpoint
The 5G SA (standalone network mode) will accelerate industry digital transformation due to its advantages of low latency, high bandwidth and heavy traffic management. Huawei cooperates with carriers in China and abroad to conduct extensive exploration and trials in vertical industries, such as steel, power grid, campus, and ports. Take a port enterprise in Shenzhen as an example – the smart port solution is deployed through the 5G SA network, providing service scenarios such as remote control of port machine and 5G unmanned vehicle-route coordination, achieving capabilities unheard of in 4G networks.
New generation 5G SA network technologies will undoubtedly create huge business value in the future. But how can carriers build clear business models to monetize new 5G SA productivity? This poses many challenges to the billing system:
1. 5G scenarios are diversified, especially in the B2B market. Huawei will work with partners to provide industry solutions, and cooperate and share value with them in 5G private networks, private lines, slicing, and other scenarios. Multiple new dimensions (such as the actual speed and delay) need to be quickly introduced to increase both the traffic volume and revenue.
2. The 5G service volume is growing exponentially (10 times the speed, 10 times the usage, and 100 times the call detail record (CDR) volume). For example, Chinese carriers have over 600 million IoT connections. Such high concurrency poses challenges to system stability in the future.
3. 3GPP defines new interfaces and architectures for 5G SA, making it difficult for mainstream vendors in the industry to upgrade smoothly.
4. The traditional monolithic architecture and silo systems lead to high costs and long time to market (TTM) that can stretch anywhere between three to six months. Therefore, cost efficiency improvement is urgently required.
In July, Huawei will launch CBS V500R021, the new generation of Convergent Billing Solution based on 3GPP R16. It is the world’s first cloud-native billing solution that supports micro-service and container architecture for both applications and databases. What is the differentiated competitiveness of the new solution?
1. Multiple Basic-Advanced-Flexible (BAF) dimensions and diversified 5G monetization methods
Based on the global SA commercial cases and the accumulation of the B2B industry in China, more than 300 industry monetization templates have been created and can be used as out of the box solutions. The BAF multi-dimensional business model allows customers to easily select the desired charging dimensions on demand.
2. Full cloud architecture, which improves cost efficiency, and is ready for the future
CBS V500R021 is deployed in distributed mode, reducing hardware costs by 50% compared with the traditional mode. The automatic CI/CD and open-source DevOps tool chain are supported, shortening TTM from 3 months to 7 days. Software as a service (SaaS) subscriptions based on the public cloud are provided in Europe, allowing customers to quickly complete deployment in light assets within three months.
3. High system reliability of 99.9999%, uninterrupted service, and zero CDR loss
Based on micro-service distributed architecture, N-Live and gray release technologies can improve system stability to 99.9999% (31.5 seconds of interruption in one year). The N-Live architecture can conduct switchover automatically without interrupting services and requires no manual intervention for recovery.
4. Smooth upgrade to support 5G SA
CBS V500R005 can be smoothly upgraded to V500R021 to support cloud native and 5G monetization with system deployment completed within three months. In-depth convergence of all networks, services, subscribers, and customers is achieved through one system.
Huawei is committed to making stable investments in billing solutions, serving 2.3 billion subscribers and more than 200 carriers worldwide. Huawei ranks No.1 in the contribution of proposals for 5G charging standards (3GPP R15 and R16). Huawei released the world’s first 5G SA charging version in London in February 2020. Subsequently, in July 2020, the world’s first 5G SA commercial site was launched in Thailand based on Huawei 5G SA billing solution. In 2020, 23 5G billing solution contracts were signed, including 11 5G SA contracts. In the same year, 45 projects were delivered, involving 130 million subscribers.
With various monetization methods and leading cloud-native architecture, Huawei’s new generation of billing solution helps carriers monetize new 5G SA productivity with more agile, efficient, and reliable capabilities.
