Business Support and Control System
Business Support and Control System 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 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 100+ 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.
Telecom areas
BSCS is a modular, scalable business support system platform that supports telecom operators in handling:- Mediation: Gathers and preprocesses usage data 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. Modules: GMD, VMD and NPX.
iX Series products
- iX Rating: Real-time rating of usage events, CDR reading, rating and tarif 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
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.
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 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.| Version | Company | Release date | Key Functionalities | Major New Features | Installed Customers |
| BSCS | LHS | 1990 | Basic postpaid billing, customer data management | Initial client-server architecture, CDR processing | |
| BSCS 2 | LHS | 1994 | Improved rating and billing | First modular design attempts, enhanced CDR handling | |
| BSCS 3 | LHS | 1996 | Basic support for GSM networks | Enhanced GUI, support for SIM-based subscriber ID | |
| BSCS 4 | LHS | 1997 | Tariff flexibility, discounting | Multiple contract support, international language support | Amazonia Celular, Brazil; CTBC, Brazil; Fascel Ltd., India |
| BSCS 5 | LHS | 1999 | Mature postpaid billing, hierarchical customer accounts | Monolithic client-server system for postpaid billing. Multi-currency, multi-taxation, improved user interface. | Telecentro Oeste, Brazil; TeleMig, Brazil; TM Cellular, Malasya; Nextel Peru; Nextel Mexico; Nextel Brasil; Nextel Argentina; Comcel, Colombia; Iusacell, Mexico |
| BSCS 6 | Sema | 2000 | Large operator support, CRM features introduced | Account hierarchies, customizable workflows, prepaid integration begins. | TIM Brazil; TIM Peru |
| BSCS 7 | SchlumbergerSema | 2002 | GSM/3G support, convergence begins; DaTA Queue and UDR metadata. | First real attempt at convergent billing, product catalog. | TIM Hellas, Greece; E-Plus, Germany; Conecel, Ecuador |
| BSCS 8 | SchlumbergerSema | 2003 | True convergent billing system | Modular architecture, IP service support, advanced rating engine, CRM improvement. | Cosmote, Greece; Cosmote, Romania; Azercell Telecom, Azerbaijan; Sercom, Guatemala; Orascom Telecom, Tunisia; Wattanya, Kuwait; Turkcell, Turkey; Aktel, Bangladesh; Wattanya, Algerie; AMC Albania Mobile, Albania |
| BSCS iX R1 | LHS | 14-02-05 | Modular, SOA-based convergent billing. New generation of fully convergent pre- and post-paid billing and customer care solutions. | BSCS iX R1 integrates prepaid/postpaid convergence, service bundling, and a unified product catalog through its Data Queue architecture. Built on LHS’ modular iX platform, it supports real-time billing and customer management, enabling gradual system replacement and seamless integration. Its components—iX Rating, iX Billing, and web-based customer/contract management—make BSCS the flagship solution for next-generation telecom operations. | OPT New Caledonia, France; StarHub, Singapore; Iusacell, Mexico; Du EITC, Dubai; BeST, Belarus; T-Mobile Poland |
| BSCS iX R2 | LHS | 2006 | Enhanced scalability and workflow automation | iX Collections R2, customer segmentation, promise-to-pay, flexible dunning, SOAP/REST APIs | Nextel Peru; Nextel Mexico; Nextel Brazil; T-Mobile Makedonski Telcom, Macedonia; Telenor Serbia; Thuraya, UAE; Patel, Palestine |
| BSCS iX R3 | LHS | 16-Feb-09 | Unified user experience and policy integration, it provides end2end charging, billing, and customer care system. Its open stateoftheart architecture is highly business adaptive, enabling stepwise modular upgrades in line with changes to the business environment. This means that BSCS iX Release 3 can meet the endtoend requirements of entry level communication service providers with high growth potential or can easily be integrated into the complex IT environment of mature businesses with highly demanding large scale subscriber bases. | R3 introduces an improved GUI, policy control integration, faster rating, and advanced discount frameworks. It expands flexibility for wholesale and partner management while supporting all-IP service models. For the first time, it includes advanced reporting and business intelligence through SAP BusinessObjects™, highlighting the strategic value of billing data for performance analysis and decision-making. | Tunisiana GSM, Tunisia |
| BSCS iX R4 | Ericsson | 22-Feb-12 | Virtualization readiness and operational efficiency, Convergent billing solution using a standard, business orientated SID based API. BSCS iX R4 is a convergent, end-to-end billing and customer care system for any type of communications service provider: mobile, fixed-line, broadband, TV etc. It's highly suited to service providers with a strong postpaid subscriber base. | Enhanced support for virtualized infrastructure, fraud management integration, real-time analytics. Integrated Telecom CRM, an integrated billing and customer relationship management product for the telecom industry based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. Designed to help operators deliver superior customer serv+E15ice as well as help telecoms operate more efficiently and cut costs. | Entel Chile; Bhutan Telecom, Bhutan |
| CBiO R1 | Ericsson | 2013 | Ericsson Charging Billing in One | Combines components like BSCS iX, Ericsson Charging System, CRM, Product Catalog, and Order Management into one deployable stack | TMO USA |
| CBiO R2 | Ericsson | 2014 | Ericsson Charging Billing in One | Zain, Kuwait; Zain, Saudi Arabia | |
| CBiO R3 | Ericsson | 2015 | Ericsson Charging Billing in One | Charging and Billing in One offers a flexible evolution path to convergence enabling CSPs to move to fully convergent BSS environment in a step wise fashion in-line with their specific business priorities and starting point, in terms of their existing IT environment. | |
| BSCS iX R16 | Ericsson | 2016 | BSCS iX R16 | ||
| BSCS iX R17 | Ericsson | 2017 | BSCS iX R17 | A1 Serbia; Starhub, Singapore | |
| BSCS iX R18 | Ericsson | 2018 | BSCS iX R18 | Entel Peru; Orange Egypt | |
| EB20 | Ericsson | 2020 | Ericsson Billing offers flexible real-time billing with configurable Taxation, Multi-Tenancy, Multi-Currency support, Promotion Management, configurable Rounding Algorithms and Open Interfaces. The billing component can gather charges, relating to any service for a current settlement period – including those provided by MVNOs, content providers, digital partners, subsidiaries and others. It supports both batch and on-demand billing modes for customer and partner documents, and its split-billing capabilities allow separation of corporate and private invoices with different charging events based on flexible criteria. | This cloud-native solution is designed to meet the needs of modern 5G networks, supporting real-time billing for diverse use cases like pay-as-you-go, subscription services, and microtransactions. Providing greater flexibility and scalability to handle the growing number of devices and services. | Orange Egypt; Indosat, Indonesia; Telefonica O2, Czech Republic; Ooredoo Kuwait; |
| EB21 | Ericsson | 2021 | Ericsson Billing | Entel Chile; La Poste Telecom, France; Thuraya, UAE | |
| EB22 | Ericsson | 2022 | Ericsson Billing | Orange Tunisie; Vodafone Egypt | |
| EB23 | Ericsson | 2023 | Ericsson Billing | Full AWS Cloud support | Odido Netherlands; Cosmote Greece; Etisalat, UAE; Zain Kuwait |
| EB24 | Ericsson | 2024 | Ericsson Billing | Al-Madar, Libya; ONATi, French Polynesia; TIM Brazil; Magenta Telecom | |
| EB25 | Ericsson | 2025 | Ericsson Billing | To be released, under development | |
| EB26 | Ericsson | 2026 | Ericsson Billing | Future release |