Billing & Charging Demo

Split charging and billing will power new business models in the Machine to Machine (M2M) market

Intelligent ubiquitous connectivity, device capability, service integrity and sustainable business models are all required for the M2M market to continue to scale. Commercial M2M business models thrive on reliable, regular revenue streams with sustainable service costs to match these revenue streams. These traits have fuelled the growth of the mobile industry over the last 20 years and these same traits will deliver accelerated growth in the M2M industry over the next 20 years. This growth, coupled with interoperable standards and high levels of security, will enable multiple devices from multiple vendors to seamlessly communicate thereby delivering the Internet of Things.

Simple, flexible charging and revenue management is central to many commercial M2M business models. For instance a connected vehicle may have one business model for telematics monitoring of vehicle performance and another business model for delivery of consumer focused entertainment content. Mobile Operators are uniquely placed to provide secure, scalable and reliable billing platforms for M2M solutions, as billing and charging is central to Mobile Operators existing business models.

The GSMA and their industry partners have developed a proof of concept whereby multiple operators may bill from the same SIM in different territories. Therefore an M2M device manufactured in one country may be exported around the world and utilise different operators in different countries and split billing by service type. For instance a connected car manufactured in Japan constructed with an embedded SIM could utilise one Mobile Operator for engineering information about the condition of the vehicle and servicing information from any territory in the world utilising existing agreed roaming agreements. This same vehicle could utilise a different Mobile Operator for the provision of in-vehicle mobile broadband services providing video and audio entertainment billed through a different local operator.  In this example the manufacturer of the vehicle may well pay for the engineering data, while the entertainment would be billed to the driver and owner of the vehicle.

Mobile Operator split charging and revenue management delivers a number benefits

  • Enables different suppliers to receive revenues for different services
  • Utilises trusted billed systems by licensed and regulated operators
  • Enables low bandwidth services to be supported globally while high bandwidth may be delivered more efficiently locally
  • Split billing and charging maybe applied to a range of M2M devices and reduces the costs of global deployment.

The GSMA split charging and billing proof of concept demonstration is an interactive web tool which takes you through the main features and benefits of flexible charging and revenue management. For more information and to get involved contact us at [email protected]