Part One: Introduction

The steady growth of IP-based services in the mobile, broadband and fixed line sectors are presenting operators and service providers with new business opportunities as well as considerable challenges in terms of charging for these services and recovering revenues.

The Intec workshop to be held at Billing Systems 2005 surveys this business and technology landscape, and uses a case study approach to explain how real-time charging and service control can play a significant role in maximising next generation ARPU levels for telecommunications operators in this highly competitive business environment.

“Everything over IP?”

The technology shift from the SS7 based circuit switched world that has been the mainstay of the telecommunications industry for the past few decades, to the packet based world dominated by the Internet Protocol (IP) is having a significant impact on telecommunications service delivery. Consumers can now access external packet data networks such as the Internet and corporate LANs via mobile data access technologies such as GPRS/EDGE/UMTS, CDMA2000 Mobile IP and 802.11 (WiFi).

In addition to the delivery of digital content and data access services over a telecommunications network, the IP world also provides a new bearer for voice (which may be viewed as the original form of mobile content) with the emergence of technologies such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and H.323 for the delivery of Voice over IP (VoIP). The vision of the 3GPP UMTS Release 5 IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) describes a telecommunications world that is entirely underpinned by IP technologies, and provides a further indication of the merging of the network and IT domains.