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Business Support and Control System

Business Support and Control System (BSCS) is a telecom billing and customer care platform originally developed by LHS Telekommunikation GmbH, a German company founded in 1990 by ex-IBM engineers Hartmut Lademacher, Jachim Hertel and Rainer Zimmerman.

Even after a series of significant mergers and acquisitions, including LHS being acquired by Sema Group, then by Schlumberger, followed by transitions through Atos and ultimately Ericsson, the BSCS platform continued to evolve steadily, adapting to the fast-changing telecom landscape. Rather than being phased out, BSCS was enhanced and rebranded over the years, growing from a traditional postpaid billing engine into a convergent, modular, and real-time capable revenue management solution. Under Ericsson, it became a core part of the CBiO (Charging & Billing in One) suite, enabling telecom operators to manage both prepaid and postpaid customers in a unified environment. Despite organizational changes, the platform’s core strength and flexibility ensured its continuity and relevance as a modern telecom revenue system. Still today BSCS is one of the most widely used billing systems in the global telecom industry, especially for mobile operators, the current version is named Ericsson Billing.

BSCS, and its various versions, was deployed by over 110+ telecom operators in 80+ countries, the product was mostly popular in Europe, Latin America, Middle East, Africa, and Asia, serving both Tier 1 and Tier 2 telecom operators. Back in december 2012, Ericsson announced that it has surpassed the 2 billion mark in the number of worldwide subscriptions served by its billing solutions (CBiO), which – according to the World Cellular Information Service (WCIS) database – is equivalent to a 31% market share of global subscriptions.

Telecom areas

BSCS is a modular, scalable business support system (BSS) platform that supports telecom operators in handling:

  • Mediation: Gathers and preprocesses usage data (CDRs) from network elements before rating. Modules: DIH, FIH and AIH.
  • Rating: Applies tariffs and discounts to events like calls, data sessions, or content usage. Modules PRIH and RIH.
  • Billing: Generates invoices for voice, data, SMS, roaming, and value-added services. Modules: RLH, BCH and BGH.
  • Customer Care: Supports agent interfaces for customer management, service activation, account updates. Modules: CX and CMS.
  • Product Management: Allows operators to define and manage complex pricing plans and service bundles. Modules: PX and RA.
  • Finance: Handles payment external interfaces like SAP and others. Modules: PIH, PTH and IOH.
  • Collections: Handles dunning, overdue payment workflows, and integration with credit bureaus. Modules: DCH and CAH.
  • Provisioning: Enables the activation of SIM cards, IMEI and other device information on Network Elements in different market platforms and technologies (GSM, Voice mail, iDEN, Leased Line, IP, etc.). Modules: GMD, VMD and NPX.

iX Series products

After BSCS 8, the Rating Package and Billing Package were modularized and could be installed as separated products. At MWC Barcelona 2009, LHS launched the iX Series, a range of next-generation business support system components that enable operators to rapidly roll out new services to their entire customer base. The new iX Series product portfolio comprises iX Rating and iX Billing, iX Mediation, and iX Recharge. With its iX Series products, the stand-alone business systems for tier-1 carriers that are designed to fit easily into their business environment.

  • iX Rating: Real-time rating of usage events, CDR reading, rating and tariff taxation.
  • iX Billing: Bill run, invoice generation, account settlement.
  • iX Recharge: Support real-time and event-driven prepaid balance top-ups and recharges across telecom services.
  • iX Collections: Debt and dunning management, automatic handling of debt collection.
  • iX Customer Care: Agent interface and CRM.
  • iX Mediation: CDR collection and normalization.
  • NPX Network Provisioning Extension: Customizable provisioning interface.

Architecture and technologies involved

BSCS operated on a client/server software platform. It uses Oracle database to persist information, Java-based modules with integration with SOAP/REST APIs, Data Queues, and external mediation devices and interfaces, like DUP programming language. Rating, Mediation, Provisioning and Billing were developed in ANSI C and C++ with PRO-C access to Oracle database. Interface and boundaries provisioning module uses EDIFACT files to communicate to external systems. The invoice creation and generation is highly customizable using XML format files.

Beginning in BSCS 7 version, the product development centres around the company’s ‘6 degrees of convergence’ methodology, which is as follows:

  • Single Customer Care and Self Care, Partner Management – resulting in enhanced customer care efficiency and extending CRM to partner management
  • Single Marketing View – reducing churn, and improving marketing by having no replication between the prepaid and postpaid databases
  • Unified Services and Tariffs – all services are available to all subscribers, it is just a payment choice at the service level
  • Integrated Balance Management – realtime balances maintained centrally with balance control at the service level
  • Integrated Payments and Recharge – lowering costs and increasing revenue and customer service levels
  • Consolidated Platforms and Technology – resulting in more efficient hardware, skills and maintenance costs.

Also introduced in BSCS 7 is the robust queue-based data distribution mechanism known as DaTa Queue, which is used to manage and route Usage Detail Records (UDR) and related processing files between modules. This mechanism plays a critical role in ensuring decoupled, scalable, and asynchronous communication across different subsystems—such as Mediation, Rating, Billing, Invoicing, and Collections.

In short, DaTa Queue is the backbone feature of BSCS internal processing architecture, allowing the system to efficiently handle millions of records instantly in a modular and fault-tolerant way. The UDR file format is patented data record metadata format (patent number WO2013129988A2) with standardized flat files/XML that uses metadata to determine routing and handling logic.

BSCS versions

From 1990 to 2025, BSCS had many different versions and distinct product names. Currently BSCS does not exist as brand and it evolved to become Ericsson Billing.

References