Telecom mediation

BSS mediation 

BSS mediation remains the cornerstone of existing communication networks. It delivers aggregated and consolidated service usage data from the network to CSP billing and other BSS/IT systems.

The CSP requirement is to have a unified system for consolidating usage data from various sources, normalizing it, transforming it, enriching it, and delivering it to the appropriate destination systems. Data sources can be for example 3GPP defined network functions in different domains (5G/4G/IMS core), charging systems, enterprise applications, and IoT devices.

Today, Communications Service Providers (CSPs) face challenges in processing siloed data from multiple systems, supported by different hardware architectures, and maintained by varied and complex tools. 

These challenges drive up costs and slow down the time to market for both launching new services and generating new revenue. Specific Telecom mediation challenges include:

CSPs need better capabilities to build automation and, in the future, more autonomy in network operations and the BSS. This requires the ability to tap into diverse network data: RAN, Core, transport, IP, usage, telemetry, applications, and cloud infrastructure.

Automation enables CSPs to build future service offerings in a TCO-efficient manner, provide time-to-market/value, and deliver a seamless customer experience.

As monetization and operations use cases increasingly rely on a consolidated view of the data, it has become imperative for CSPs to build efficient network data management.

Data volumes in the network layer are increasing rapidly due to the implementation of 5G Core, and observations of a tenfold increase in consumption-related data volumes (compared to 4G ePC) are possible. The consumption-related data is generated by smartphone users, IoT, telemetry, network assurance KPI counters, device security log transfers, etc.

This creates new requirements to manage, aggregate, and correlate the data for various OSS and BSS applications in a unified manner, to provide a consolidated view to monetize, assure, and secure the services.

To efficiently monetize and promote new services, CSPs need real-time access to service usage data. This information enables real-time triggering based on predefined rules to let associated systems, such as campaign management, know the optimal moment to send the right promotion. Streaming data requires operating networks in a more automated way to detect potential anomalies or service quality issues, and the ability to act immediately on service degradation situations.

The role of mediation is expanding from conventional usage mediation towards data mediation to cover new types of use cases. For example, there could be automated and more autonomous operations, security assurance, service assurance, and intelligent analytics, all supported by AI. This would require efficient network mediation and data management implementation across various domains.

Telecom mediation can enable several advanced use cases that help CSPs to prepare and exploit new monetization opportunities.

Nokia mediation is a field-proven, scalable, and TCO efficient converged Billing Mediation solution, serving different types of requirements for consumer, enterprise, wholesale/MVNO, IoT, roaming, and interconnect billing to monetize services in the 5G era. With this foundation of usage data management Nokia Mediation expands to versatile data mediation to meet complex network data challenges and provide one layer to integrate to any network domain (RAN, Core, Transport, Edge, FTTx/fibre, IP) and manage horizontal data integration and consolidating data for seamless consumable flow for autonomous network applications, without the need to multiply data integration for individual applications.

Nokia’s mediation platform is ranked number one in the industry (Appledore, 2024). Our converged mediation platform is used by 175+ CSPs around the world, with the largest deployment processing 300 billion events every day.

Pre-integrated with the wider Nokia portfolio, the Nokia mediation platform offers a wide range of existing integration options with network elements and systems from many different vendors.

Nokia mediation provides “one truth of network data” with intelligent data integration and processing to enable real-time decisions and actions, giving CSPs peace of mind in the autonomous networks era.