Fifty years ago in 1968, I began my apprenticeship with what in those days was called General Post Office Telephones, which was later privatised and became BT. Things were relatively simple back then.
For the 10 years I worked there, the network infrastructure was based on Strowger technology (look it up if you’re under 50) and the billing process was primitive by today’s standards. A man with a large format camera on a tripod and a step ladder would come into the telephone exchange and take a photograph of the customer’s meters.
Back in his office, he would transpose the readings on to a sheet which would then be passed to the typing pool where the bills were made up prior to being posted to the subscribers. The business didn’t have a sales office as such because there were no competitors. There was only one place you could get a phone from and that was the GPO.
I mention this because apart from this year being something of a personal anniversary, a recently-published white paper about the current state of communications service providers’ (CSPs) billing systems caught my attention. Written by Heavy Reading’s senior analyst James Crawshaw and sponsored by Huawei, CSP Revenue Management: Enabling the Digital Service Provider Evolution highlights the need for modern billing systems and the issues facing CSPs as they get ready for the digital age.
The survey, based on 100 responses from 75 organisations around the world, found that on average, CSPs have five billing systems, each with an average age of five years. It notes that although CSPs have invested billions of dollars upgrading their networks to give consumers and enterprises the bandwidth they’ve come to demand, many continue to operate with the same business support systems (BSS) they employed in the era of telephony and web browsing.
The survey also found that 50% of respondents said it was likely they would be increasing spending on their billing systems in the next couple of years. However, 41% of total respondents said they intend to continue using existing billing systems and would only be upgrading those aspects which would help them manage the transition to digital. A total of 31% said they would be using new revenue management systems for new lines of business such as the Internet of things (IoT), but carry on using legacy systems for existing lines of business.
What I found surprising was that only 10% of respondents said they thought their organisation would migrate all lines of business to a new revenue management system. I know that migrating customers from one system to another is costly, time-consuming and fraught with difficulties.
Indeed, I know of at least one operator, who shall remain nameless, who had to cancel a major network upgrade because they lost track of which customers had been transferred onto the new billing system and which ones were still on the legacy system. Some customers got free calls for a month or more before the project was cancelled, so it’s not an easy task.
Over the last 15 years or so that I’ve been writing about support systems, again and again I’ve heard operators say that they were aiming to greatly reduce the number of billing systems used in their operations, ideally down to a single system for all their lines of business.
This is an ambition which I’ve always felt made perfect sense, so why not bite the bullet and rationalise the whole revenue management platform? But as the white paper points out, the overall trend is that operators will continue to make tactical upgrades to existing systems, with some new system deployments for new lines of business.
But hang on, isn’t that how they ended up with multiple systems in the first place? Back in the days of the man with the camera and stepladder, billing was simply a matter of registering distance and call duration, but over the years, more and more services have been rolled out, each requiring a separate billing system because they were so different to the core telephony offering – the advent of pre- and post-paid mobile communications being a case in point.
As the white paper rightly suggests, “Without modern revenue management capabilities, CSPs cannot properly monetise their assets. This applies to their existing communications services such as voice, as well as emerging digital ones such as e-health and the connected home.”
However, it seems we are looking at a scenario where the number of billing systems used by the majority of CSPs for various services is about to start increasing again with the inevitable reappearance of the dreaded silos. I’m getting a bad case of déjà vu here!
By Peter Dykes, freelance telecoms writer
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