The Research And Realization For A Solution Of BOSS Convergent Billing

At present, all telecom enterprise is faced with three major challenges: how to maintain and develop the existing customer relationship; how to introduce new services and how to adopt a more flexible mode of payment. In order to respond to these challenges, telecommunications service providers also need to establish a convergent system to replace two separated billing system.China is about to issue 3G licenses, the 3G business itself is to provide integrated business such as voice, high-speed data, value-added services in the same network platform, so it require the Billing System achieving billing convergence. Convergent billing system can deal with the complicated content-based billing process effectively and deployment of various new business rapidly. The convergent billing system can also provide service effectively and reduce operating costs.Currently, there are two main telecommunications billing solutions. One is SCP plus real-time billing system, prepaid users use real-time billing process, postpaid users use quasi real-time billing. Another is a prepaid and postpaid subscribers all use quasi-real-time billing, These two solutions all have unavoidable drawbacks, and could not meet the demand of the 3G network environment billing .In this paper, four convergence charging solution are researched. Every solution's merits, shortcomings and implement difficulties are analyzed. Based on the depth-study on the OCS (Online Charging System) specification of 3GPP, a convergent billing solution based on OCS is provided. This solution provides the flexibility close to quasi-real-time charging system and it also can drop arrearage costs to minimum.