Julia Gullstrand, Wholesale Agreements and Solutions (WAS) Group Director explains how the GSMA’s Billing and Charging Evolution (BCE) specification can streamline the rollout and delivery of sophisticated roaming services.
Mobile networks are becoming ever more capable and versatile. Operators’ billing and charging systems need to keep up. As wireless connectivity becomes increasingly pivotal to our lives, consumers and businesses want their devices and equipment to be able to access the full suite of mobile services in their home markets and across international borders.
As a result, wholesale roaming is evolving. Data roaming traffic is growing rapidly with the launch of voice over LTE services, while the ongoing rollout of 5G standalone networks will likely result in another upswing in roaming traffic.
At the same time, the shift from circuit switched to packet switched networks enables home operators to have greater control over their subscribers’ roaming experience, and also eliminates the need for the exchange of detailed records to facilitate retail billing.
In response, operators’ wholesale billing and charging mechanisms need to become more agile. To that end, the GSMA has created BCE (Billing and Charging Evolution) specifications for wholesale roaming billing and settlement. A simplified and flexible wholesale process, BCE is designed to support both existing and future roaming services, including Internet of Things (IoT), 5G standalone with network slicing, non-terrestrial networks and other advanced technologies, as well as traditional cellular connectivity. BCE can improve efficiency by automating and streamlining daily, monthly and annual wholesale processes, while reducing the complexity associated with legacy wholesale approaches.
Fast, flexible and efficient processes
The business case for employing BCE is becoming stronger and stronger. Operators are offering a growing array of sophisticated services to roamers and the wholesale commercial terms and charging models are more complex, requiring manual intervention to identify and rate the traffic.
BCE can address many of these wholesale billing challenges. For example, the BCE IOT spreadsheet helps operators clarify their charging models and may also be useful for TAP discounts. BCE can support daily or monthly IMSI (international mobile subscriber identity) charges, flat fee charges, and other creative tier models, such as back to first and step tiers.
Importantly, BCE was designed with automation in mind. To support monthly invoicing processes, usage is aggregated prior to any rating. BCE also allows for different data types to be mapped to specific services, so that the usage can be segmented and then the correct tariff can be charged for those services.
As operators implement 5G standalone and network slicing, they need to be able to configure their systems quickly to support new services. BCE mediation processes enable operators to identify service names for their traffic, so roaming usage can be aggregated and rated.
BCE offers other key benefits. For example, it allows for year-end processes to be settled quickly and efficiently even for operator groups. The annual end of rating period (or IOT discount process) has become more important over time. Historically, this process has been manual and not standardised, but, with BCE, GSMA IDSBCE Group designed a process and new report format where all the group usage (both TAP and BCE) can be re-aggregated and then new charging models applied to that usage. The exchange of one standard enables automation of year-end processes.
With operators increasingly home routing traffic, usage records are not required by the home operator for retail billing. Therefore, there is no need for TAP records to be exchanged. Instead, BCE can be used to exchange aggregated usage reports for traffic monitoring purposes. But it can also support the exchange of detailed records, where there is a business need.
Leading operators highlight the benefits of BCE
In a recent GSMA webinar, chair of the GSMA’s IDSBCE group, John Verna of AT&T outlined how BCE can transform wholesale billing and settlements for roaming. Jose Antonio Vivanco Martos of Telefónica and Pascal Dejardin of Orange also discussed how their businesses are benefitting from the BCE specification.
In particular, Jose Antonio focused on how BCE can help to automate the complex settlement processes that are required to reconcile monthly billing amounts with actual annual revenue. Cautioning against trying to do everything at once, he suggested that operators start by using BCE to automate monthly invoicing and then progress to the settlement of more complex models.
Pascal then discussed how BCE can help facilitate group-wide wholesale agreements that enable participants to benefit from economies of scale. For example, BCE can be used to trigger discounts when volumes of particular traffic types reach a certain threshold. Noting that the Orange group has hundreds of roaming deals with operators, Pascal said it will begin by migrating the most straightforward agreements to BCE before progressing to the more complex deals.
As the speakers in the webinar made very clear, BCE is not all or nothing. It can be used in up to five different business areas, as your business requires and as your agreements mandate. The first two areas – updating your agreements and implementing monthly invoicing – offer an easy way to get started with BCE with minimal internal investment. Over time, you can also employ BCE to implement operational improvements, launch new services and support end-of-rating periods.
The ease with which BCE can support new services will become increasingly important as operators begin to launch roaming agreements supporting 5G standalone and satellite-based connectivity. That’s beginning to happen. During the webinar, Jose Antonio noted that two operators recently signed the first official commercial 5G standalone roaming agreement. That will be the first of many, further underlining the need for BCE.
Watch the recording of our recent GSMA LinkedIn Live to discover how Billing and Charging Evolution (BCE) is helping operators modernise wholesale billing and settlement processes.
The GSMA has merged the IDS, MCS, and BCE groups into a single subgroup under the Wholesale Agreements Solutions (WAS). This group is now called IDSBCE and will continue to cover the same topics addressed within the previous IDS, MCS, and BCE subgroups. IDSBCE provides a forum for GSMA operator members and industry members (such as financial clearing agents, data clearing houses) to collaborate and develop standard solutions for interoperability.
Get Involved
If you’re a GSMA Member and interested in collaborating on this topic, please join the IDSBCE Group on Member Gateway.
Find out more about GSMA Working Groups and how their role in driving industry collaboration.
Become a GSMA Member
Join a global community of like-minded professionals and organisations who share a common goal of advancing the mobile ecosystem. Find out more.