Page 92 - SAMENA Trends - May-June 2023

ARTICLE SAMENA TRENDS

ARTICLE

5G and IoT Use Cases are to Disrupt Wholesale

Roaming Billing

Compelling events for a transition away from 30-year-old billing standards

and processes

Today’s next generations of technologies are revolutionizing not
just the mobile industry itself, but also how the mobile industry
enables others to grow as well, at an equally rapid pace. Wholesale
billing and settlement is clearly no exception. The explosion in
use cases and business models dictates the need for evolution
in wholesale roaming monetization. Designed with the future in
mind, GSMA’s new Billing & Charging Evolution standard (BCE)
introduces a new level of flexibility to wholesale charging and
settlement models. BCE also enables usage to be reconciled,
leading to more accuracy in invoicing, reduction in billing disputes
and hence faster settlement.
BCE will eventually replace TAP as the
industry’s standard for wholesale roaming
billing and charging and by embracing

the BCE standard, operators position
themselves to leverage the full potential
of IoT, 5G standalone, and the revenue-
generating services they provide.

The GSMA’s BCE standard is a more flexible model capable of
efficiently supporting the large amounts of billing and charging
activities that 5G and IoT introduce into the mobile ecosystem.

Prior to GSMA’s development of BCE, clearing and settlement
with Transferred Account Procedure (TAP) had proved itself
Elke Reis as a successful standard, specifically for wholesale and retail
Senior Emerging Product Specialist billing of roaming, largely thanks to its widespread adoption.
Syniverse For years, TAP—Transferred Account Procedures—had been the
only standard for wholesale roaming and billing settlement. TAP
was originally designed to support Voice and SMS and was well-
suited for handling simple billing scenarios for mobile data usage.
However, with the emergence of 5G standalone and IoT, combined
with the increased importance of mobile data and usage of online
charging methods, the TAP standard no longer accommodates
the emerging billing requirements and evolving use cases, leading

92 MAY-JUNE 2023