The arrival of 5G represents a watershed change in telecommunications, not just for customers but for operators, enterprises, and digital service providers. This change promises super-fast speeds, low latency, and massive device connectivity, and has everything from the consumer, gaming, healthcare, manufacturing, and mobility in its sights, but one critical part is often overlooked: billing.
While telcos are busy innovating with 5G and advancing towards that reality, traditional telecom billing systems are heading for a breaking point. To capture the full potential value of 5G, telecommunications providers will need to fundamentally rethink how they monetize, price and manage services in a hyper-connected real-time world.
Why the evolution of billing matters for 5G
5G is fundamentally different from 4G. 4G was predominantly based on mobile data usage, whereas 5G opens up a whole new galaxy of use cases that will each be associated with their monetization model. For example, take network slicing for enterprises, on-demand AR/VR services, IoT subscription-based services, and real-time B2B2X ecosystems. This will require both agility and precision (which legacy billing systems were never built to handle) and require a level of dynamic decision-making.
Some of the key challenges associated with 5G that will need fresh thinking and innovation in billing include:
- Real-time charging for dynamic and usage-based services
- Revenue sharing with partners in complex digital ecosystems
- Event-based billing for data and applications like autonomous vehicles or industrial automation.
- Usage-based billing for activities such as autonomous vehicles or industrial automation
- Network slicing monetization, including SLAs and QoS-based pricingÂ
- Microtransactions at scale, for IoT and machine-to-machine
Billing Innovations in the 5G Era
To navigate this complexity and scale, the leading telcos are using next-generation billing systems designed for speed, agility and intelligence. Five major trends:
1. Cloud-Native Billing Platforms
Cloud-native architectures let telcos quickly and elastically scale an offering, and change their services faster. Cloud-native means systems can support real-time charging, have automated provisioning and allow modular and add-on services, which means providers can more efficiently bring to market a 5G offering.
2. AI Powered Revenue Management
More sophisticated billing tactics are taking shape using AI and machine learning technologies, from usage prediction & dynamic pricing, fraud detection and prevention, personalised bundling of services. These new capabilities help marketers make targeted, compelling offers and improve retention of existing customers.
3. Blockchain for Revenue Sharing
With multiple partners in 5G ecosystems (cloud providers, content creators, developers) blockchain allows secure, real-time and automated methods of sharing revenue with multiple parties reducing the lengthy reconciliation processes and greater trust.
4. Convergent Charging Systems
5G is blurring the lines between prepaid, postpaid and enterprise billing. Convergent charging allows all visit in one singular view, serving a hybrid of models seamlessly to the customer as they transact.
5. Open APIs and Ecosystem Readiness
Modern billing platforms are API-first, allowing seamless integration with external platforms, marketplaces, and enterprise systems. This is critical for 5G business models relying on co-creation and third-party services.
The Strategic Advantage for Telcos
Billing today is not just a back-office function – it’s a strategic differentiator. The ability to inject innovative pricing models, partnership velocity, and provide real time digital experiences will define the leaders from the laggards in the 5G race.
Proactive CSPs (communications service providers) are already investing in agile BSS/OSS stacks that are:
- Modular and cloud native
- Real-time and event driven
- Open and interoperable
- AI enabled and customer centric
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