In late 2007, Telkomsel selected OpenCloud to deliver an integrated Intelligent Network charging gateway solution. The Rhino-based solution went live in November 2008 and is the largest JAIN SLEE implementation in the world. It comprises more than 20 clustered, fault-tolerant Rhino servers configured to support several thousand transactions per second. It handles all charging for non-voice and third-party content and services in real-time within the session.

Telkomsel is the fourth largest mobile operator in Asia Pacific and has a strong reputation for innovation. With a market share of 53 per cent of the Indonesian mobile market, Telkomsel currently has nearly 50 million subscribers, the majority of which are prepaid. By 2010, Ovum predicts that Indonesia will be third only to China and India for mobile messaging connections in Asia.

Telkomsel employ are large number of IN platforms which are dispersed across the country to provide prepaid call control for the customer base. With such a geographically dispersed and decentralised network spanning thousands of islands, Telkomsel selected OpenCloud’s Rhino to process and verify charges for message and content events and data session-based charges before and during service delivery, regardless of the subscriber’s location within Indonesia. Real-time charging means the operator can avoid the revenue leakage problems which are often associated with pre-paid subscribers and third-party services. The Rhino solution is dimensioned to handle several thousand sessions per second and uses the new 3GPP Diameter charging standard to interface to the IN platforms that hold the prepaid balances.

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.

Beyond the standard “in-session” charging challenges associated with prepaid content and data, the Indonesian networking environment also has some fairly unique and specific network challenges. Telkomsel needed to work with a company that had experience of large scale IN platforms and could help meet the needs of a massive and growing subscriber base.