T-Mobile Austria virtualizes BSS, targets new data tariffs

T-Mobile Austria has announced that it will be implementing a virtualized charging system solution as part of a wider virtualized BSS strategy. The solution, provided by BSS specialist Openet, will be responsible for creating personalised offers to T-Mobile Austria’s pay-as-you-go, contract, consumer and enterprise subscribers.

According to Openet, the Evolved Charging Solution (ECS) will provide the telco with previously unachievable rating and charging capabilities, which will help T-Mobile manage its existing services, and help deliver new services faster and more efficiently, while also making them more easily monetised.

As is the primary functional benefit of most network virtualization solutions, the vendor also claims its virtualized BSS charging solution will help boost T-Mobile’s business agility, as well as increasing its service availability and reliability.

Niall Norton, the CEO of Openet, reckons T-Mobile will now be able to roll-out a new range of data tariffs this year as a consequence of their partnership.

“Our ECS enables a host of new functionality which provides a rich customer engagement and will enable T-Mobile to rapidly introduce a new advanced data tariff portfolio this year,” he said. “We’re delighted to have successfully fought off some intensive competition to secure T-Mobile Austria’s business.”

The CTO of T-Mobile Austria, Ruediger Koester, is confident the added agility in charging and billing will allow the operator to reinforce its position in the marketplace.

“Their… technically complex solutions will help us to launch differentiating new products in our increasingly competitive marketplace,” he said.

In the last few years, virtualization of carrier network operations has proven to be one of the big talking points in telecoms networking.  The Telecoms.com Intelligence Annual Industry Survey 2015 examined viewpoints on virtualized BSS within the operator community.

Of the 2,000+ respondents who answered, nearly two thirds revealed they either already have or are planning to implement a virtualized BSS solution. At this stage just under half of respondents indicated that implementation of virtualized BSS is at least one year away.

When asked to say what the primary benefit of virtualized BSS would be, speed of deployment and time to market was the clear top answer, garnering 38% of responses, while other benefits such as capex reduction and more differentiated service offerings attracted half the numbers.

This is perhaps consistent with a degree of ambiguity towards the benefits of virtualized solutions over and above a growing consensus that it improves speed and agility.