Content Charging Gateway

Aricent’s Content Charging Gateway (CCG), a part of the BSS infra­structure, provides a unified view of service management functions, supports content billing and charging capabilities for convergent networks, and manages multiple content pricing structures (pay per usage, pay per view, premium content pricing etc. ) . The key function­alities of the system are as follows:

  1. CCG performs session management for both prepaid and postpaid scenarios
  2. CCG supports generation of Usage Detail Records (UDRs) for postpaid scenarios
  3. CCG supports simultaneous communication over varied real-time protocols, such as DIAMETER, OSA/PARLAY, GTP, XML/HTTP and CORBA

Features

  1. Higher Content and Service Gateway Utilization – CCG provides a unified view of service management functions like subscriber management, quota management, policy management etc., thus representing a single point of contact for multiple price plans, content provisioning and partner settlement
  2. Real Time Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) Data Usage Capabilities – CCG allows subscriber-specific service validation, service delivery, rating and charging (both offline & online) using DPI data. This results in precise subscriber profiling and quota management based on the subscriber’s available balance
  3. Pre-integration with Service Gateways – Pre-integration with common service gateway equipment (e.g. CISCO’s content gateway) provides plug-and-play capabilities, resulting in rapid service deployment
  4. Multiple Interfaces for System Integration – DIAMETER protocol based interfaces integrate with a variety of pre-paid billing systems and service gateways for a converged communications service provider
  5. Online event and session based authorization – CCG provides ‘Pay as you go’ IP based services on per subscriber basis i.e. content charging as per content usage
  6. Higher availability – CCG is a content charging solution with up to 100% availability. This maintains subscribers’ service  sessions and charging transactions during failovers, thus preserving end user experience and operator revenue

Benefits

  1. Higher degree of flexibility, allowing an operator to leverage different charging models for premium content
  2. Allows access to mobile content and services and charging in real-time, both for pre-paid and postpaid subscribers
  3. Centralized billing functionality to offer a single consolidated bill for usage of different mobile services
  4. Improved revenue generation as new services can be charged based on data usage or time duration or content type
  5. Facilitates relationship management with partners by providing a concise and clear view of mobile content usage

Selected Customer Case Studies

An Indian Greenfield Operator Ensures Mobile Content Provisioning using Aricent’s Content Charging Gateway: The operator enhanced its CDMA network’s capability for content based charging and offering content based services to its subscribers by integrating with a dedi­cated Content Charging Gateway (CCG).