Contents

This analysis discusses Omdia’s recently published 5G Charging and Policy Vendor Survey and its exploration of customer trends, solution functionality, non-functional aspects, compliance, and adjacent systems. The report should help MNOs looking for the key factors to consider when choosing 5G charging and policy solutions.

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Summary

Mobile network operators (MNOs) have made significant investments in 5G spectrum and radio access network (RAN) infrastructure, but this has yet to translate into any noticeable increase in revenue. Successful monetization of 5G will require the deployment of a converged charging system (CCS) as part of the broader upgrade of the 5G core.

Omdia’s recently published 5G Charging and Policy Vendor Survey explores customer trends (adoption of 5G CCS, charging use cases, etc.), solution functionality (default templates, support for offline charging, etc.), non-functional aspects (cloud nativeness, release cadence, etc.), compliance (3GPP releases, TM Forum APIs, etc.), and adjacent systems (e.g., interaction with mediation). The report should help MNOs looking for the key factors to consider when choosing 5G charging and policy solutions.

5G CCS vendor survey

Many MNOs initially deployed non-standalone 5G (new radio with 4G core) to utilize the bandwidth of their newly acquired spectrum and leverage the greater spectral efficiency of 5G radio.

The 5G rollouts typically focused on the RAN while deferring the core upgrade, partly because of the complexities of its cloud-native architecture. However, this approach limits the MNOs to 4G monetization schemes. While there are many elements in the 5G core (user plane function, session management function, etc.), the key to monetization is charging. MNOs must upgrade to the 5G CCS to unlock the new monetization opportunities of 5G.       

Omdia’s recent publication, 5G Charging and Policy Vendor Survey: Solution Functionality, Standards Compliance, and Customer Adoption (see Further reading), covers the aggregate insights and wisdom of 17 5G CCS vendors surveyed in 3Q23.

The participating companies range from large telecom BSS vendors to network equipment providers and niche specialists. Vendor sizes range from those with hundreds of MNO customers with billions of consumers to those with a small number of largely MVNO customers. For each of the 17 vendors in our survey, Figure 1 plots the total number of customers versus the total number of subscribers those customers serve. We have used a log-log scale because the market is highly concentrated with a few vendors having a dominant market share. The largest vendor serves 38% of the subscriber base, while the following three largest serve another 47%.

Figure 1: Total subscribers vs. total customers of charging vendors Figure 1: Total subscribers vs. total customers of charging vendors Source: Omdia

Key questions we have posed

The 5G core networks open the doorway for operators to innovate their service and product offerings. Discussions shaping the industry include the following:

  • How do advanced network features like network slicing affect the charging system and influence decision-making?
  • Does bundling (or unbundling) of charging, policy, and the rest of BSS matter?
  • Do DevOps methodologies like CI/CD change the industry dynamics? 
  • Which vendors deploy their solutions in public, private, and hybrid cloud environments?
  • Are vendors really leveraging AI (and GenAI) in their solutions?

Omdia’s 5G Charging and Policy Vendor Survey explores:

  • Customers: adoption of 5G CCS; proportion of charging customers who also buy policy; buyer personas; charging use cases
  • Solution functionality: default templates; support for offline charging; backward compatibility; fraud detection
  • Solution non-functional aspects: cloud nativeness; compute and memory requirements; release cadence; SaaS offering; support for hybrid cloud; AI usage
  • Compliance: 3GPP releases; new features R18 will bring; TM Forum APIs
  • Adjacent systems: interaction of charging with policy and mediation.

The report should help MNOs looking for the key factors to consider when choosing 5G charging and policy solutions.

Appendix

Further reading 

5G Charging and Policy Vendor Survey: Solution Functionality, Standards Compliance, and Customer Adoption (December 2023)

2024 Trends to Watch: Core Networks (October 2023)

Service Providers Core Networks Survey – 2023 (September 2023)

Author

Joe Hoffman, Principal Analyst, Service Provider

[email protected]