Ericsson Billing vs Faucet

Ericsson Billing is a convergent, end-to-end billing system for communications providers offering mobile, fixed-line, broadband, TV, digital, or OTT services. It supports prepaid and postpaid services in one contract and manages customers and partners through a common database. A convergent rating engine processes voice, data, content, and other event-based usage online or in batches. Billing can run on demand or in batches, with split billing for separate corporate and private invoices. Functions include configurable taxation, multi-tenancy, multiple currencies, promotions, rounding algorithms, and plan management. The system supports traditional telecom services alongside digital services, 5G, and IoT, including TAP/RAP and IMS specifications. Ericsson describes open, componentized architecture, TM Forum and REST interfaces, an SDK, public or private cloud deployment, and horizontal auto-scaling. AI/ML use cases address invoice quality, while a GUI chatbot can explain invoice differences. Pricing is on request.

Faucet is a free, open-source OpenFlow controller for network operators managing production networks and OpenFlow hardware. It moves routing, neighbour discovery and switching algorithms into vendor-independent server software with a centralised control plane. Faucet controls OpenFlow 1.3.x switches with multiple tables and group tables, supporting VLANs, IPv4 and IPv6, static and BGP routing, access control lists, port mirroring and switch stacking. Policy-based forwarding can offload processing to external systems, including 802.1X through hostapd. YAML provides network configuration, with a documented command for checking configuration before loading it. Installation options include pip3, apt-get and Docker; the guide places Faucet with Gauge, Prometheus and Grafana, while InfluxDB supplies time-series statistics. TLS can protect the switch control channel, and fail-secure or fail-standalone modes are available. High availability uses redundant controllers with matching configuration but no shared state. Faucet runs on Linux and self-hosted deployments and is licensed under Apache-2.0.