Viettel Group announced that it has successfully developed an online charging service called vOCS, which has won a silver prize at the IT World Awards in the category of Most Creative IT Products.

The OCS is considered the most important tool for a telecom service provider because it contains all customer consumption data, business policies, products and services.

Only three other companies, Ericsson (Sweden), Huawei and ZTE (China), now make OCSs and all telecom service providers around the world have been buying from them.

With Viettel’s vOCS, Viet Nam becomes only the third nation in the world to create an OCS.

Viettel’s vOCS 3.0, which took six years to develop, was deployed at the end of last year.

Within six months Viettel extended its use to 90 million subscribers.

The system can serve 24 million subscribers/site while the biggest OCS earlier could only serve 12 million/site.

Furthermore, it is able to design different fee packages for different customers, a function that other OCS systems cannot manage.

Besides, vOCS 3.0 only costs 30 - 40 per cent of other OCSs’ price.

Nguyen Dinh Chien, Viettel Group general deputy director in charge of research and development, said: “Being the biggest information, communications and technologies group in Viet Nam, Viettel has set itself the responsibility of researching and successfully creating telecom infrastructure to ensure information security and safety and protect our cyberspace.

“Around 20 – 30 per cent of Viettel’s telecom infrastructure equipment is manufactured in-house.”

It has enabled Viettel to not buy OCSs for six markets – Viet Nam, East Timor, Peru, Cameroon, Burundi, and Tanzania – where it has a total of 140 million subscribers. The savings is estimated at around US$50 million. In future Viettel will use the system in all its international markets.

Next, the vOCS3.0 is set to be commercialised.

The product is technically complete, is awaiting packaging and marketing, and will be sold to international clients. — VNS