Telkomsel Real-time Charging

Telkomsel is the fourth largest mobile operator in Asia Pacific and has a strong reputation for innovation. Telkomsel has a market share of 53 per cent of the Indonesian mobile market, the majority of which are prepaid. Indonesia and Telkomsel subscribers in particular are one of the world’s largest users of the mobile internet, where smartphone access to VAS and mobile broadband web access is commonplace. The Indonesian mobile market also continues to grow rapidly.

In late 2007, Telkomsel selected OpenCloud to deliver a real-time charging gateway solution for their value-added web, messaging and content services. The Rhino-based solution went live in November 2008 and instantly became the largest JAIN SLEE implementation in the world. It originally comprised more than 20 clustered, fault-tolerant Rhino servers configured to support just under two thousand transactions per second. At that time, Telkomsel had around 50 million active subscribers.

Since then, the Charging Gateway has been extended as the Telkomsel subscriber base has grown and as they have added further services. By early 2010, Telkomsel had over 85 million subscribers, all of which are supported by the OpenCloud charging gateway. Today, the capacity has been upgraded three-fold to six thousand transactions per second and it communicates with several additional sites and further prepaid IN platforms. The Charging Gateway handles all charging for non-voice and third-party content and services in real-time within the session, and remains the world’s largest JAIN SLEE implementation.

Telkomsel employ are large number of prepaid IN platforms which are dispersed geographically across the country to provide prepaid call control for the customer base. The OpenCloud Rhino Charging Gateway:

1. Establishes the location of the user in real-time by querying the HLR using the MAP protocol
2. Queries the relevant IN platform using the Diameter protocol to verify that there is sufficient balance available to initiate the VAS delivery
3. Authorises the VAS session initiation or event
4. Delivers subsequent VAS session charging events and allows service to continue if there is sufficient balance available
5. Terminates the service if the balance is exhausted or
6. Communicates with the IN platform to commit the final charges.

Real-time charging means the operator can avoid the revenue leakage problems which are often associated with pre-paid subscribers and third-party services.

With real-time charging systems validating account balance and approving payments before service delivery Telkomsel is now able to continue to carve its reputation for service innovation confident that it is able to capture the revenues promised by new offerings.