Cloud-native is the standalone choice for 5G
Vodafone has started deploying Nokia’s Converged Charging (NCC) software in multiple countries including the UK and Italy. The cloud-native software replaces legacy charging platforms and provides real-time rating and charging capabilities for emerging 5G-specific services like network slicing – useful as standalone networks begin to see the light of day.
Vodafone began rolling out its standalone network in some UK cities in June.
NCC operates as a containerised network function in a 5G standalone environment. NCC covers the role of OCS in 4G networks, (CCS in 5G) and with its flexible product and no code functionality offers can be used to rate and charge for any type of usage. Built on a cloud native architecture using microservices, it can be deployed over public cloud or operator defined Container as a Service (CaaS) environments.
NCC uses a charging configurator that utilizes an intuitive business user interface to quickly create new pricing and market offers, reducing the time required to on-board new customers.
In 2021 the vendor began encouraging operators to migrate business-critical, high frequency charging applications to the public cloud by deploying NCC on Amazon Web Services. They can then run workloads on AWS benefitting from continuous availability including launching new services using drag and drop functionality.
Vodafone chief network officer Alberto Ripepi said: “5G enables many new services and with this new system, new ways to charge for them. By leveraging the scale of our pan-European and African networks, we can help customers manage factory equipment, open developer marketplaces using our APIs, and enable enterprises to offer bespoke products to their own customers.”
Nokia SVP business applications Hamdy Farid said: “We are pleased to be furthering our relationship with Vodafone through the roll-out of Nokia’s Converged Charging solution. As advanced 5G services start to become more widespread, our Converged Charging solution is very well-placed to help communication service providers and enterprises drive innovative 5G use cases and business models and deliver significant operating efficiency improvements.”
In March, Hrvatski Telekom chose NCC to help it modernise on-line charging. At the time CTO Boris Drilo said NCC gave the telco: “an agile and configurable monetisation solution to ultimately allow us to better meet our customers’ growing network application demands.”