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Billing and Order Support System – The World’s Largest Mobile Telecommunications Providers

The company replaced Oracle Exadata with Altibase for Billing and Order Support System (BOSS) in one of 33 provinces in China.

Use Case
Billing
Current Customer
China Telecom, China Unicom, China Mobile, KT, SK Telecom and LG Uplus
Industry
Telecommunications

Who

The company, the top telecommunications provider in China, is a pioneer in next generation integrated billing solutions. The company is one of the first to launch a commercial 3G and 4G service using personal communication service technology. The company is the world’s largest mobile phone operator by total number of subscribers with over 900 million subscribers. The company operates in all 33 provinces in China.

Problem

The company suffered from operational deficiencies as its legacy database, Oracle Exadata, could no longer cope with the geometric increase in the number of subscribers.

Inability to effectively integrate billing for different services and policies: the company was unable to simultaneously execute its essential integrated billing at the customer access level.

Inability for customers to accurately check billing balances: because of stale data, customers did not receive correct balance information, which prevented reliable payment execution.

Inability to provide other stable value-added services: high traffic volume and resulting bottlenecks caused the company to have difficulty in adding more services which were vital for the company to stay competitive. The services include text messages, information on when to replenish, and promotional discounts between family members, lovers, friends, etc.

Solution

The company has adopted Altibase in the hybrid mode into its integrated billing solutions since 2015 for its Billing and Order Support System (BOSS).[1] In choosing a database vendor in 2015, the company considered three options: additional purchases of Oracle Exadata, Oracle TimesTen and Altibase. After a series of benchmark tests, Altibase was chosen for its reputation of high performance, reliability and support. The company took full advantage of Altibase’s hybrid architecture by storing cold data on disk when data became stale and less frequently used. The burden on its DB resultantly became lighter as it stored only hot data in memory. As a result, the multi-level performance enhancement allowed for further scale and even more complex services so that the company could stay competitive and profitable.

Results

The new system can now provide accurate and real time billing information for its 30 million subscribers in the province and can handle more than 2 billion transactions per day, which was not possible previously as the company used to process data and information on a batch basis.

With processing delays eliminated, customers are provided with a wide variety of services, which has resulted in more client satisfaction and improvement in the company’s bottom line.

Altibase enabled the company to replace its aging and expensive Oracle Exadata on Unix platform with Altibase’s X86 based Linux platform providing shared nothing distribution system, which resulted in lower TCO.

Consistent high performance and flexibility in storing and manipulating data is now possible with Altibase’s hybrid architecture and memory partitioned tables.

Non-stop, non-downtime billing service is guaranteed with parallel replication and offline replication features embedded in Altibase.

Improved and more flexible horizontal and vertical scalability is now possible with Altibase’s memory partitioned tables and replication features.

[1] BOSS Billing system provides charging services based on voice/text, 2G/3G/4G data usage.

Mission - Critical Succeed

Altibase 7.3