Converged Charging solutions

Take advantage of 5G monetization opportunities

Check out our new launch: AVA Charging SaaS

Unlock 5G monetization opportunities with convergent charging

Nokia Charging solutions are built for the dynamic needs of the 5G economy. It provides real-time rating and charging capabilities, enabling Communications Service Providers (CSPs) to effectively monetize all new revenue opportunities and provide a better experience for their consumer and enterprise customers.

To cater to the needs of different CSP customers, Nokia Charging solutions are available in two variants:

Nokia Converged Charging (NCC) is a cloud native charging solution to provide real-time rating and charging capabilities, enabling new monetization opportunities for communication service providers (CSPs) and enterprises. NCC covers the role of OCS in 4G network, CCS in 5G and thank to its flexible product offers can be used to rate and charge any type of usage.
AVA Charging as a Service - The SaaS evolution of our proven Nokia Converged Charging (NCC) solution accelerates 5G BSS transformation, offers fast proven integration with 5G SA network functions, and provides CSP’s the capability to rapidly bring new commercial product offers to market through automation, product catalog with pre-defined use cases and GUI driven no-code charging configurators.

On this page

Are you ready for 5G monetization?
What is Converged Charging?
What are the key considerations when selecting a new 5g converged charging solution?
Nokia Converged Charging solution
Charging by the slice video series
Now available in SaaS
The no code approach
Related topics
Related products and solutions
Learn more about Monetization

Are you ready for 5G monetization?

5G is revolutionizing the telecom industry through innovative use cases ranging from cloud gaming for consumers, to machine remote control for enterprises. However, to unlock the commercial value of these use cases, they need to be offered through new value driven business models beyond traditional session and volume based products.

Nokia’s recent 5G monetization survey uncovered some startling facts. A staggering 98% of operators surveyed realize that they need to alter their existing BSS systems to support new 5G use cases. The primary objective of BSS transformation would be to offer new and innovative pricing models based on quality of service, location, network slice, API usage, among other parameters.

Two thirds of CSP’s think real time charging is the top investment area for 5G monetization. This is because the charging engine is often seen as the heart of the CSP monetization system. A highly configurable charging solution which drives fast automated offer creation through proven integration with 5G SA Core network functions is the need of the hour.

What is Converged Charging?

Converged charging brings together online and off-line charging systems to address new and emerging 5G monetization use cases. Introduced by 3GPP, the charging function (CHF) collects all network and service usage data. The 5G charging function (5G CHF) enables payments (understands how much a user should be charged for services consumed) and allows CSPs to create new services and offers and roll these out quickly and efficiently to consumers.

What are the key considerations when selecting a new 5G converged charging solution?

A gamechanger for telco monetization

Flexibility and time-to-market agility with new commercial offers

Unlocking the monetization potential of 5G demands high flexibility of the charging solution to support future rating and charging models. Triggers for charging could include quality of service, slices, API events, IoT device streams – essentially the new 5G charging solution should be capable of “Charging Anything”. In addition, the new charging system should simplify and automate new product and offer creation for the 5G ecosystem. No-code or low-code monetization systems can catalyze this offer creation process speeding up time to market.

Fast de-risked 5G BSS transformation

There are many paths to 5G BSS transformation, and it is the service provider’s technology goals which determine the optimal strategy. For instance, if the primary goal is fast transformation to quickly roll out new 5G offers, the CSP can opt to go for a separate SaaS cloud BSS stack like which will enable commercial deployment and rapid experimentation with new business models in a fraction of the time an architectural evolution takes.

Proven CHF integration to 5G SA Core with commercial deployments

Creating new commercial models based on 5G network events has a basic dependency – integration to the underlying 5G SA core network functions, which generate the events and triggers which are charged through the CHF or charging function. The success or failure of a 5G Charging transformation project is dependent on the proven ability of the chosen charging solution to easily integrate with core functions including AMF, NRF, SMF, NEF.

"Charging by the slice" video series

Episode 1 - Here's how 5G has revolutionized telco monetization

Charging by the Slice - The Internet of Things

Episode 2 - Is IoT the next big 'thing' in the 5G economy?

Episode 3 - Monetization schemes just got SaaSy!

Nokia Converged Charging solutions

Nokia’s converged charging solutions are designed for the 5G era to provide real-time rating and charging capabilities, enabling new monetization opportunities for communication service providers (CSPs) and enterprises. Built on a cloud native architecture using microservices, it can be deployed over public cloud or operator defined Container as a Service (CaaS) environments.

Proven to scale, our Charging solutions are commercially deployed in customer environments exceeding 100+ million subscribers. Carrier grade performance is assured - charging records for more than 1.5 billion customers are handled by Nokia Charging Solutions across the globe today.

Our Charging solutions are augmented by adjacent BSS capabilities such as mediation, billing and policy control, as well as Nokia’s rich set of AI/ML enabled customer and business analytics capabilities. In addition, Nokia can offer a complete 5G Digital Monetization solution.

Pre-integrated as part of Nokia 5G core solutions, it is also field proven with multi-vendor deployments for both 5G Standalone (SA) and 5G Non-Standalone (NSA).

Explore our Converged Charging content collection

Now available as SaaS

Built on Nokia’s Telecom SaaS delivery framework, AVA Charging as a Service is an evolution of our proven Nokia Converged Charging (NCC) solution and can be deployed over a choice of hyperscaler public clouds.

AVA Charging helps you commercialize new offers quickly and flexibly. If your business grows, the service grows with you and remains reliable, thanks to the carrier grade scalability. The inbuilt product catalog’s intuitive interface can be grasped immediately with no coding skills, and offers can be implemented in a fraction of the time these processes normally take. The catalog gives you the flexibility to create offers for 5G or the Internet of Things (IoT) and you can reuse or modify templates to speed things up even more. Charges can be created against any metric, and insights support new commercial models as they evolve.

AVA Charging has proven API-based integration to brownfield environments, and proven fast integration to 5G SA network functions in multivendor environments.
BSS transformations are lengthy (typically 1-2 years). The Charging SaaS model gets this down to a few clicks.
The service is driven by open APIs, making it cloud-ready, consistent and straightforward to modify.

Supercharge 5G and IoT monetization

The no-code approach

With our no code charging configurator, we have removed the usual obstacles to a smooth workflow and developed something truly easy to use. Readymade modular components abstract the technical details, and the true/false statements and flows make it simple to intuit. It’s very quick to create and modify offers, with highly flexible rules to allow both your priorities and your markets the space to evolve.

Nokia Charging configurator

Flexible BSS transformation options

Integrate Nokia’s 5G Convergent Charging solution to your existing BSS environment through our easily to implement open API’s and SDK. Or we can help you build out a complete 5G BSS Digital monetization solution bringing Nokia’s Convergent Charging, Mediation, Policy and other monetization capabilities pre-integrated with partner BSS solutions such as Qvantel Flex BSS.

Nokia no-code 5G monetization

Modernizing BSS for the 5G era

Customer case with Sunrise

Check out how Sunrise (Switzerland) transformed their BSS with Nokia’s Monetization and Digital Operations software to better support existing services and emerging 5G use cases.

Check out why Sunrise chose us

Modernizing BSS for the 5G era

Charge ‘anything’

Nokia’s Converged Charging solutions can also be extended towards vertical markets such as utilities, smart cities streaming providers, automotive and logistics to provide flexible no-code based rating and charging for ‘non connectivity’ streams and API events. For example, our Converged Charging solutions are currently being used as part of a charging and billing solution for electricity, gas and water consumption across a smart city in the MEA region.