By Elana Crowne, Director of Product Marketing, Cloud and Network Services, Nokia
When people think of the word mediation, they usually associate it with legal mediation, the role of a neutral third-party facilitator to resolve a dispute between two or more parties.
The role of telecom mediation is a facilitator of sorts, that of a data facilitator, acting as a mediator between multiple communication service provider (CSP) systems, and transforming the data so it can be used by the business and operations support systems (B/OSS).
The advent of 5G and the massive data explosion and network complexity that comes with it means that the role of the telecom mediation system is becoming an increasingly important part of the CSP IT landscape.
5G data growth
The rollout of 5G creates many new business and monetization opportunities for CSPs in e-health, private wireless and smart stadiums to name a few, as well as advancing a wide variety of industrial IoT use cases.
With the GSMA estimating the IoT revenue opportunity beyond connectivity will reach a whopping $1.1 trillion and for IoT connections to reach almost 25 billion globally by 2025, there will be a huge growth in the amount of 5G usage data.
The challenge for CSPs
This growth in 5G usage data creates a multitude of challenges for CSPs. These include challenges relating to the processing of siloed data through multiple different systems that are supported by different hardware architectures and maintained by different and complex tools. These challenges drive up costs and slow time to market for launching of new services.
Additionally, the traditional role of the mediation system is no longer enough for CSPs who truly want to unlock 5G monetization opportunities.
Traditionally, mediation’s primary role was to aggregate event data records and push them into the billing system in a pre-defined format. This was usually done in an offline capacity and was primarily focused on post-paid billing processes. The systems were also often not built as cloud-native or optimized for data processing in the cloud.
The expanding role of mediation
In today’s 5G world, mediation systems have a much-extended role when it comes to CSP monetization. They play a crucial role in collecting, validating, enriching and aggregating usage data events required for real-time billing processes, enabling CSP revenue generation as well as serving other BSS applications such as revenue assurance, fraud management, interconnect/partner settlement and business intelligence.
New 5G business opportunities will mean that CSPs will look for new ways to monetize these, and this will include more innovative bundling and subscription packages. These could be for an individual consumer, for groups of consumers like a family, or for enterprise customers.
This will add significant complexity to the CSP billing and settlement process and create more demand for understanding different demand patterns in real-time, and outside of traditional billing periods, driving the need for smarter, scalable and future-ready telecom mediation systems.
New 5G services
As 5G and associated technologies such as network slicing and edge computing continue to evolve, the mediation system will also continue to evolve as well.
Mediation will need to support new 5G services, such as AR, VR and IoT applications and handle the more complex charging and monetization models that come with those. New 5G stand-alone (SA) network integrations mean these services can be charged in more innovative ways that focus on the value to the end customer.
For example, for IoT devices, the integration to the access management function (AMF) could be used for activity-based charging, according to the number of accesses made to a specific network slice. This type of charging model puts greater demands on network mediation to manage and aggregate usage in-real time.
According to IDC, global spending on edge computing is expected to reach $274 billion by 2025. As edge computing becomes more prevalent, mediation will also need to measure the usage of new applications and provide insights into how resources are being used and where optimizations can be made. This process won’t be easy and will require additional intelligence and data analytics capabilities to gather and analyze data from contributing sources, such as edge devices, edge servers and the overall network.
The unified mediation layer is the path to success
To thrive in this new reality, CSPs need to find ways to reduce their data processing costs so they can efficiently manage the future usage data of IoT devices, enterprises and consumers. This will also be crucial for other data associated with future monetization models, including cloud resources, signaling/probing data, network slice usage, IoT applications and locational data.
All this usage data processing needs to occur with the use of a cloud-native, horizontal, real-time, mediation layer, which isn’t able to be managed by traditional, siloed mediation systems. By using this unified approach, CSP customers including B2B, B2C and B2B2X and ecosystem partners will have access to the best possible digital experience and consolidated real-time usage billing.
Evolving for the future
U.S. actress and comedian, Lily Tomlin once said, “The road to success is always under construction,” and this is also true for the road to successful 5G monetization.
The future-ready mediation system needs to expand and evolve beyond its traditional role of aggregation to provide more intelligent traffic management, QoS monitoring and data analytics capabilities to support new 5G services.
This cannot be accomplished without a highly scalable and distributable real-time, unified mediation platform with the capability not only to support current CSP monetization needs but also those in the future.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elana Crowne, Director of Product Marketing, Cloud and Network Services, Nokia
With close to 15 years of experience in business and strategy consulting both outside and within the Telecommunications industry, Elana is a skilled problem solver and storyteller with a customer first mindset. Elana is the Head of Product Marketing for Nokia’s Monetization Portfolio and is responsible for defining and taking Nokia’s monetization story to market.
