How the broadband of the future will be billed

A key driver of more flexible consumer broadband services is more flexible and powerful service provider billing, charging and pricing applications. It's no secret that most broadband plans today are flat-rate, all-you-can-eat — often with some fine print about usage caps that rarely come into play (or cause customer havoc when they do).

In large part it's that one-size-fits-all approach to billing and charging that is at the center of many of the problems facing carrier broadband delivery today. And it is those monolithic billing systems carriers have relied on for years — slow to process transactions and designed to support simple, yet difficult to change, billing schemes (without million-dollar upgrade projects) — that must be overcome for broadband delivery to reach its true potential.

“The trend is that broadband is moving from an all-you-can-eat service driven by ever-increasing bandwidth apps to a combination of throttling, usage and [quality of service] that could drive new services and allow consumers to differentiate what type of service they get with what they are prepared to pay for,” said Nigel Upton, general manager of business support system products for HP. “If you have a tightly integrated and proprietary billing package, it is harder to modify business models. If you have a more flexible, multilayer architecture that separates business logic from the billing application, then change is considerably easier.”

The key to such an approach, said Upton and others, is more flexible telco back-office service-oriented architectures that allow all the elements of creating and pricing a service — network management, policy control, front-end business rule creation and back-end billing outputs — to be tweaked and adjusted individually rather than be hard-coded together.

“With the separation of business rules from the application, new promotions, new charging scenarios and customized packaging can be done dynamically,” Upton said, adding that such an approach gives “the operator flexibility and speed to offer different options such as different rates for guaranteed QOS or dedicated pipes for high-bandwidth applications being used by the consumer, such as video delivery or online gaming.”