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Thursday, 03 March 2016 02:02

With IoT Pushing its Limit, are Today’s Billing Systems Ready to Answer the Call of All Things Connected?

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With IoT Pushing its Limit, are Today’s Billing Systems Ready to Answer the Call of All Things Connected? Image Credit: IVR Technologies

Most Mobile Operators are already headed towards ‘real-time’ and ‘convergence’ when it comes to billing. With the plethora of services they are offering today in the marketplace including fast growing services such as WiFi Calling, VoLTE, Operator WiFi Services and various content-based offerings such as Operator TV services, real-time convergent billing systems enable Mobile Operators to keep tab of a customer’s usage and spending across the board and enforce macro-level policies for each subscriber in real-time.

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With the rapid evolution within the Internet-of-Things(IoT) and M2M services, and the fact that Mobile Operators will be bundling IoT connectivity, platform and content (specifically apps) as-a-service along with their existing services, the need to account for new emerging use cases such as industrial automation, fleet management or monitoring of health data will require existing billing systems to extend significantly to incorporate data usage on various networks, across various new devices/equipment and various lines of service.

This in turn will mean that billing systems will need to converge further, become more and more network agnostic, be able to continuously cater to millions of data sessions each minute and be connected to thousands of mobile and fixed nodes at any time. With IoT pushing its limit, are today’s billing systems ready to answer the call of all things connected?