Innovating to Meet Customer Needs
Three Group Solutions aggregates global mobile network assets owned by its parent company, CK Hutchison Holdings Limited (CK Hutchison), in eleven markets: Italy, the UK, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Ireland, Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, Vietnam and Sri Lanka. Some of the world’s largest and innovative MVNOs (mobile virtual network operators) utilise these networks along with the group’s international roaming footprint of more than 600 carriers. Five years ago, MNVOs looking to take advantage of this global network would need to undergo an MVNE platform onboarding process taking up to nine months.
Recognising the need for greater agility and a platform that will help MVNOs grow quickly, Three Group Solutions set out to provide a modern cloud environment and lower barriers to innovation.
Using Cloud Operating Models to Upgrade Core Network, BSS, and Online Charging Solutions
In 2019, Three Group Solutions joined forces with CSG and adopted CSG Ascendon as its BSS to manage billing, payments, customer support, and reporting for its MVNO customers. This cloud-native digital BSS solution is powered by several AWS services, particularly AWS Fargate—a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine.
Different CSG modules use many other AWS services, such as Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a collection of managed services that make it simple to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud, and Amazon MSK, which makes it easy to ingest and process streaming data in real time with fully managed Apache Kafka.
By 2021, WG2 (now part of Cisco) was engaged to deploy its mobile core network on the cloud, delivering simplicity, improving operational efficiency, and gaining the ability to quickly develop new initiatives to meet market needs. The WG2 core delivers a full set of capabilities and network functions on AWS for subscriber authentication, provisioning, policy control, packet core, voice, and messaging.
Together with these AWS Partners, Three Group Solutions built a complete mobile core network with online charging and BSS in the cloud. This project involved a complete transformation of the company’s cloud architecture and introduced network-as-a-service deployment.
In the cloud, Three Group Solutions gained tools to enhance operational efficiency, optimise resource allocation, and scale on demand. The subscriber migration to the cloud was managed with low service impact, improving existing customers’ confidence in the new solution.
Three Group Solutions adopted a multitenant cloud model, which can deliver both the core network and BSS as services, even for multicustomer business-to-business-to-everything operations. It also integrated real-time charging functionalities to run diverse and competitive pricing models at scale. The system supports a wide network spectrum, from 2G to 5G, and delivers voice, data, and messaging services seamlessly to subscribers globally.
With this MVNE platform solution, Three Group Solutions can navigate varied MVNO business demands. Quarterly updates from CSG Ascendon, coupled with the ability to customise offers, mean that the company can respond to market changes and launch new products faster. This adaptability is enhanced by the continual introduction of new AWS services release strategy, where new capabilities are added on an ongoing basis.
“Before, each new customer needed a unique build from scratch,” says Tom Gardner, director of enterprise, wholesale, and IoT products at Three Group Solutions. “Now, most of the setup is common for everyone, and only the final 20 percent is customised. This new method is more efficient, cheaper, and easier for us and our clients. With our solutions on AWS, we can onboard customers in 6–8 weeks instead of 9 months.”
“A powerful, scalable, secure, and globally consistent infrastructure on AWS is a key driver for growth, lower costs, and new business models in telecommunications,” said Erlend Prestgard, now Senior Director of Product Management at Cisco. “It opens up whole new operating and delivery models and prepares the ground for global mobile platforms and marketplaces. Three Group Solutions is at the cutting edge of this development and will benefit from being an early mover.”
Find out more or request a callback at solutions.three.com/wholesale-services.
