Ericsson Billing vs Open Virtual Network

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.

Open Virtual Network (OVN) provides logical networking for virtual machine and container environments, intended for cloud management software. It converts virtual network configurations into OpenFlow and organizes them around logical routers and switches. Listed capabilities include distributed virtual routers and logical switches, access control lists, DHCP, and a DNS server. Tunnels or other encapsulations isolate logical networks from physical and virtual networks, allowing overlapping address spaces. Virtual machines can move between physical machines without network disruption, and gateways connect tunnel-based logical networks to physical networks. Examples of cloud-management integrations include OpenStack Neutron’s ml2/ovn plugin and ovn-kubernetes. OVN runs in userspace, needs no kernel modules, and is written in platform-independent C; its generic build guide covers Linux, FreeBSD, and NetBSD hosts. It is free under the Apache 2 license, with on-premises deployment, a centralized control plane, and a Linux and self-hosted platform listing. OpenSSL libssl is optional but recommended for secure connections to OVN database servers.