The new convergent charging solution combines Amdocs and Openet expertise, said the company
This week, Amdocs unveiled Amdocs Charging, a new charging solution that the company says will help Communication Service Providers (CSPs) get a faster return on their 5G investments. The company says the new solution is already in use by its customers, including “two tier-one operators in North America.”
Amdocs explained the need serviced by the new platform in a statement.
“Historically, CSPs have maintained many BSS platforms, supporting different lines of business with dated requirements. This limits their evolution, creating siloed environments for post-paid and pre-paid, fixed and mobile, 3G/4G and 5G, and more. In the 5G and cloud-native era, such silos are becoming unsustainable, and a new paradigm is required,” said the company.
By comparison, Amdocs Charging provides consolidated charging control across mobile 3G, 4G, and 5G services, fixed, Internet of Things (IoT), pre-paid, post-paid and business-to-business (B2B). The microservices-based architecture is available on public, private and hybrid clouds, said Amdocs.
Amdocs said that Amdocs Charging is ready to scale for new 5G use cases like metaverse, virtual reality, extended reality, private enterprise networks, edge computing, network slicing and Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications.
Amdocs Charging sports a single user interface to provide high observability and ease of setup for new services, said the company. The interface sports a unified logging and alarming interface system, monitoring dashboards and support for Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP), an open-source networking automation standard hosted by The Linux Foundation.
What more, Amdocs says the new platform can help businesses CSPs modernize legacy charging environments in managed phases. The cloud-native architecture supports orchestration systems like Kubernetes, and Amdocs noted that it has evolved its own service mesh architecture to help ensure optimal telco-grade efficiency and reliability.
“It is kept up to date for emerging services and provides the flexibility required to compose charging orchestration flows involving new 5G functions and an ever-expanding set of service partners,” said Amdocs.
The new service platform sports open Application Programming Interfaces (API) and employs an open approach to enhance support and integration across Operations Support Systems (OSS)S, BSS, and the network. Amdocs Charging leverages Network Exposure Functions (NEF) and Network Data Analytics Function (NWDAF) to maintain secure network flow.
The effort is the outgrowth of the company’s $180 million acquisition of Openet, first announced in 2020. Amdocs said the new solution combines its charging offerings with those from Openet. The new platform is accessed using Amdocs’ Customer Experience Suite (CES22), a modular and cloud-native platform.
“The solution drives rapid time-to market for innovative services, which can monetize a wide range of new network currencies — helping CSPs get a return on the investments made on 5G to date. CSPs using Amdocs’ existing charging offerings can move to this new product incrementally, while leveraging proven global scalability,” said Amdocs.
In May, Amdocs announced the opening of a new Americas 5G Experience Lab in Dallas, Texas. The facility gathers service providers, enterprises, Amdocs and its 5G edge applications under one roof to provide a testbed to develop new opportunities across industries, the company said. Amdocs said it is working with the 5G Open Innovation Lab and companies like Microsoft to invest in developing state-of-the-art use cases around areas like driverless cars, rural connectivity, food resiliency and enterprise.
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