Software Release 5281

Summary | August 2024

5281 Major Features: Multitenancy, Rerating and 5G

Please watch Chris Gibson, SVP Product Management, announce the general availability of MATRIXX release 5281. This is a significant milestone, introducing or significantly enhancing two major feature areas — rerating and multitenancy — along with key additions to the product’s 5G capabilities. Combined, this represents continued expansion for MATRIXX to play a wider and stronger role for our customers.

Multitenancy

The multitenancy functionality will accelerate the delivery of wholesale offerings with a shared platform that can easily and cost-effectively provision new tenants. There is zero per-tenant infrastructure overhead making it cost-effective to provision even micro-MVNOs that can quickly scale.

Rerating

The introduction of rerating is an enabler to accommodate more and more postpaid functionality. We are steadily growing our capabilities and heading towards a future with a single monetization platform handling all business segments.

5G

We have further progressed on 5G, based on much of the work we have contributed to the 3GPP SA5 charging group, and we’re starting to hear exciting feedback from our customer base on how they plan to use these new charging reference points in their markets and scale up their deployments.

40+ New Features in this Release

There are over 40 new features in this release, and we’d be pleased to take you through all of them, including the usual focus for our granite program and the start of the evolution towards our new message-based Kafka architecture. To hear about these details or any other topic that the product management team can help you with, please get in touch.

Schedule a Meeting

Feature: Multitenancy

Ralph Woodman, Senior Staff Product Manager

Deployment Scenario: Converging and simplifying the operation and cost of multiple separately managed MVNO instances onto the MATRIXX platform.

Business Benefit: The growth in the number of MVNOs has in many cases led to multiple different charging systems being deployed within each network. Since each system has different capabilities and requires specific training, support and management, significant operational efficiencies can be achieved by aligning on a single platform. The MATRIXX multitenancy feature allows each MATRIXX instance to support multiple MVNOs, brands and customer segments (such as B2C prepaid, postpaid and B2B). The tenants logically share the infrastructure, so there is zero overhead, and it is profitable to host even the smallest of tenants. To support such deployments, the MATRIXX platform:

  • Allows each tenant to independently configure and deploy their commercial product offerings
  • Supports eligibility of offer purchases, ensuring that each subscriber can only purchase items that are applicable to its tenant
  • Enforces data privacy and security such that each tenant’s BSS systems can only access its own customers’ data and rated EDRs can be streamed separately for each tenant

Feature: Rerating

David Mariblanca, Staff Product Manager

Deployment Scenario: There are two main scenarios where rerating support is required. First, where regulatory obligations mandate the need to recalculate subscriber charges in case of pricing errors and second, the opportunity to improve customer experience through real-time rerating calculation.

Business Benefit: The MATRIXX platform performs real-time charging and balance management for subscribers. Those charges, on some occasions, need to be recalculated because:

  • A tariff was not correctly applied
  • The charges were allocated to the wrong wallet
  • Appropriate taxes were not correctly applied

A simple correction to the individual charge is not sufficient since monetary charges are cumulative and influence subsequent charges or discounts applicable to the subscriber. Therefore, it’s necessary to recalculate all charges after the correction is made. All charges that could be influenced by the error are automatically corrected with the following benefits:

  • Subscriber quality of experience improved and loyalty
  • Reduction of calls to call center (with 50% of call center calls being billing related, this potentially drives significant savings)
  • Consolidation of charging tasks and avoiding the need for a separate billing system performing these tasks, driving significant operational cost savings through reduced platform bloat

Rerating support on the MATRIXX platform is a significant milestone on the journey towards digital monetization.

Feature: 5G with 3GPP Release 17 Support

Robert Edwards, Director of Product Management

Deployment Scenario: 5G SA Network operators looking to introduce additional system capabilities and explore new charging models.

Business Benefit: With Release 17, 5G system capabilities have evolved to support mass deployment and coverage scenarios with introduction of the support for lower complexity devices, continued evolution of network slicing, Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) standardization and continued evolution of network performance analytics that can start to leverage AI/ML techniques to predict subscriber, slice and network behavior. These features will help operators in expanding the 5G addressable market space, particularly for B2B and IoT services, and help to further optimize network performance which will enable the greater usage of SLA-bound services, such as those utilizing network slicing, through the use of intent-based traffic management. With this release, MATRIXX offers:

  • Support for the charging of 3GPP Release 17-based services and devices such as Reduced Capability (RedCap) devices, NTN Satellite access and IMS/MMTel services
  • Ability to charge network slicing business owners for the ownership of particular slices from contract initiation, modification and termination through the new MATRIXX 3GPP compliant Charging Enablement Function (CEF) microservice
  • Leverage of network slice performance analytics from the NWDAF network function in order to potentially compensate network slice owners for current and predicted SLA violations through the CEF microservice
  • Optimize MATRIXX CHF charging interface to the 5GC, allowing for network events to be optionally deferred and notifications to be suppressed for certain services

Spotlight Features

Fast Restart

A new improvement to the Fast Restart system is to further optimize the time taken for a cold start of the platform. The system is built for 5x9s, but users must be prepared should the worst happen. This new capability allows for the system to produce binary checkpoint files. The format is closely aligned with the in-memory data layout and loading a binary checkpoint removes any business logic and transaction processing overhead. We have seen up to 20x faster system startup compared to the original file format.

Replay Encryption

We can now configure the replay link between two engines in a sub-domain to be encrypted with TLS. Replay is used to send completed transactions from the active site to be replicated on the standby site. This feature is particularly useful in the public cloud, where you may have regional or availability zone perimeters for your cluster and network rules, and is one of the only transit paths between those areas. Especially in the public cloud and due to the cross-site nature, this is likely one of the top priority links to be secured.

Event Sequence and Duplicate Detection

Every event created by the charging application now has a sequential and contiguous identifier included. This allows downstream systems to double-check that they are processing events in order and that there are no missing records (gap detection). The feature is a true “rubber stamp” for the audit team to ensure that the revenue processes are watertight. It is also used by our own retail-to-wholesale flow in that the downstream wholesale instance can be guaranteed it does not process any duplicate records.

Pin It on Pinterest