Oracle scales up converged charging to assist CSPs and 5G deployments

Oracle has scaled up its converged charging, a move they say will combat problems associated with mass commercial 5G deployments.

They say it has become increasingly clear that communications service providers (CSPs) will need to monetise new offers, ranging from cloud gaming to smart construction and IoT.

Oracle believes the success of these new use cases and their underlying business models will hinge on efficiently scaling charging operations to support tens or even hundreds of millions of subscribers.

With the the Cloud Scale Charging solution, the company has proven that it has the capacity to meet CSP demands. A recent test found that the solution achieved single-digit millisecond latency in a multi-site performance test scaled to support 100 million concurrently active subscribers and achieved 270,000 transactions per second.

Industry-realistic traffic patterns and charging scenarios were used for the test, including an account mix of 90% prepaid and 10% postpaid for the 100 million accounts provisioned.

Analysys Mason principal analyst John Abraham says that a number of trends will impact the way rollouts occur going forward, and businesses will have to be prepared.

"CSPs will need to charge for 5G services in real-time using hyperscale performance, scalability, and availability," he says.

"Cloud native architectures will also be essential to helping CSPs reduce cost and improve time to cash across the revenue lifecycle. Oracle's performance test results show Cloud Scale Charging is equipped to meet these stringent performance requirements."

Oracle Communications, Applications senior vice president and general manager Jason Rutherford says that with the company's new solution, CSP's will no longer have to delay innovative practices.

"The results show that with Oracle's Cloud Scale Charging, CSPs don't have to limit innovation. The solutions rating and balance management capabilities are unhindered by the complexity of the pricing model or account structure and enable CSPs to maintain scalability and business continuity without compromising performance."

"Oracle's Cloud Scale Monetisation portfolio brings together the company's deep expertise in the communications industry with a breadth of capabilities for developing high-performance cloud native solutions," he says.

The test also reaffirmed the efficacy of Cloud Scale Chargings cloud-native architecture, with efficient resource utilisation observed for a range of factors at each site in a single and multi-site test. According to a recent Oracle survey, meeting the performance requirements of 5G is a crucial driver of CSP investment in a new converged charging system, and having the resources to allow this will enable further opportunities in the cloud space.