Orange France selects Ericsson’s 5G converged charging answer

Orange beforehand mentioned it was planning to introduce 5G Standalone (SA) providers for most of the people in 2023

Ericsson and Orange France have signed a five-year settlement which can make Ericsson Charging the strategic monetization platform for Orange France’s 5G subscribers.

The cloud-native Ericsson Charging answer will serve the practically 28 million Orange France clients, and personal cell radio customers and 20 million IoT gadgets based mostly on a container based mostly deployment utilizing Ericsson Cloud Native Infrastructure Resolution (CNIS). Ericsson Charging will likely be built-in with legacy business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) billing platforms.

Emmanuel Lugagne Delpon, CTO at Orange France, mentioned: “Ericsson Charging answer will present us with superior know-how and the flexibility to speed up our time to marketplace for new services, delivering optimized operational prices, and bettering our general buyer expertise with real-time data.”

Franck Bouétard, head of Ericsson France, mentioned: “Orange France needs to drive its evolution to a full converged charging system for his or her 5G community. The Ericsson Charging answer permits them to understand, create, and capitalize on new digital alternatives”.

The Swedish vendor famous that this new settlement builds on the long-term Ericsson-Orange France partnership. In 2019, Ericsson was chosen by Orange France as its Enterprise Assist Programs (BSS) supplier for real-time on-line charging system to modernize and standardize charging methods for pay as you go and hybrid customers. This newest collaboration will make sure that Orange is provided with the capabilities to handle future market calls for, Ericsson mentioned.

Ericsson Charging is designed to optimize working prices by platform modernization. Actual-time information and insights assist to enhance the shopper expertise in addition to reduce downtime of methods and buyer providers, the seller mentioned.

Orange initially launched industrial 5G providers in 15 municipalities firstly of December 2020.

The operator mentioned that the service will likely be initially supplied although frequencies within the 3.5 GHz band and could also be supplemented by means of 2.1 GHz frequencies.

Orange beforehand mentioned it was planning to introduce 5G Standalone (SA) providers for enterprise customers in 2022, with 5G SA for most of the people to observe in 2023.

In November final yr, Orange had opened its Open RAN Integration Heart.

The brand new testing and integration facility will allow corporations from the O-RAN ecosystem to check and validate their services.

Orange’s O-RAN facility is situated at Orange Gardens in Châtillon, close to Paris. It is going to be accessible to tools suppliers of the Open RAN ecosystem, start-ups and system integrators, wishing to check the operation and interoperability of their parts with these of different suppliers. The Open RAN Integration Heart community can even be remotely accessible.

Orange mentioned that the primary goal of the O-RAN middle is to permit, in the long run, the deployment of networks able to working with {hardware} and software program from completely different suppliers.

This laboratory — the primary to be devoted to Open RAN know-how in France and the fourth in Europe — was awarded the OTIC (Open Testing and Integration Heart) label by the O-RAN Alliance, of which Orange is a founding member.