The inception of telecommunication was to connect people - Picking up the phone and calling anybody, anyplace was not something that could have been imagined 100 years ago.

The second biggest problem that telecoms tackled was an on-the-go connection, which gave rise to mobile connectivity and the rise of 2G.

The final challenge that Telcos solved was connecting the masses to the Internet via mobile devices, ushering in the era of data communication between the 3G and 4G networks.

While connectivity is still important for both consumers and businesses, it no longer addresses the present problems. As it has evolved into more of a commodity or an element of hygiene, the monetization prospects and revenues for Telcos have steadily decreased.

From this History of Technology, it is clear that except for the “Speed of light “ the only thing which is constant in this Universe is “Change “. The way the problems and technology to bring solutions has changed over the years was unperceived originally.

In the Storage Industry, the below picture depicts beautiful visualization of this change.The size of storage has been going down but the need is constantly going up.

Another practical example of this innovation I found in everyday living is below.Even in Modern Television sets these complex buttons existed for ages but were hardly used. Firestick and MI TV simplified it to a great extent and achieved a better result. i.e you solve the same problem but in a more efficient and nontraditional way.

The same is the case for BSS systems which have enjoyed Rating and Billing hundreds of $$ for Data packs to virtually offering it for free today. With this decrease on the revenue side, there is definitely a need on the technology side to reduce the cost of delivery of each rating/Billing transaction. Cloudification is a wonderful way of achieving this objective. BSS is one of the last few applications to go to the cloud due to the complexity around High transactional Databases and getting transactional consistency out from the Cloud, but eventually, it is happening. The overall TCO of the system and hence the cost of delivery of each transaction comes down.

But sooner or later we will hit the limit beyond which even the cloud will not be able to help to further reduce the TCO – What would be next?

There starts the March towards Edge and Fog.

With the cost of each billing transaction expected to go further down vis a vis the expectation on LOW Latency and customer experience going up the Edge /Fog based BSS based solution should be next in line. And the Actual Edge is the device itself.

Traditional Billing Rating systems collect Data / Time usage of a user on the device via CDRs, rate via complex algorithms, and send/generate/ rate a bill/charge. All this data is already available in the device itself and that too with much more granularity .and can be used for an overall reconciliation at the edge server.

With 5G and nonblocking mode metering, all transactions don't make sense anymore, rather a robust app that can track all this usage and generate a consolidated daily record should be a smarter way to solve the same problem. I see a future where along with the e-sim, a billing app of CSP will also be downloaded by the users.

The same irony is with Consumer Analytics:- Traditional Systems collect feeds from multiple Network sources like Packet core, Radio, PCRF, Billing, etc. On average, these systems collect 100 Tera bytes of Data in a couple of months and then co-relate to come out with consumer behavior and patterns. But in actual High ARPU customers are only 30% of the time on Network Data, the rest of the time they are on Wifi Hot spots. So even after doing all this, do these systems get the real picture? – the answer is NO.

The edge/fog device on the other hand is the real source of truth and gathering a few intelligent bytes of data will give more meaningful data and better Heuristic predictions without complex co-relations and storage requirements.

The computing power and intelligence of the edge device will need to be exploited not just in the case of analytics but also in the development of Cloud Billing.

A small concept that is hovering over my mind is a fog device-based BSS platform with a community-based CRM. A simplified picture is below.

Though it seems to be a far-fetched idea, the bigger hurdles lie beyond just technology. The thought is disruptive and unpopular as millions of $$ have already been invested over the last 5 decades by multiple vendors and CSPs and regulatory bodies in creating standards for protocols and APIs to make this work in a particular fashion. These will be NONstandard solutions with different problems which would need a different solution.

But as I said earlier – Change is the only constant except for the speed of light – so this Change might just be inevitable.

In case you want to cause a disruption by funding this solution - contact me, I carry provisional IPR for this solution:)

The Original version of this Article is available on my Linkedin too