Vietnamese engineers build telecommunications billing systems for hundreds of millions of subscribers
In an announcement on October 26, Viettel High Tech (VHT) said that this system was recognized in the category "Excellent technology deployment enterprise in Asia" of the Telecom Review Excellence Awards 2026. This is the first time a Vietnamese enterprise has been honored at this award.
The real-time charging system (Online Charging System - OCS) is one of the key components of the network, because all calls, messages, data traffic, packages and promotions are processed and charged as soon as they arise. This is also an area with high technological barriers, for a long time mainly provided by a few global technology corporations.
Viettel began developing its own billing system in 2012, after using solutions from foreign suppliers. By 2017, vOCS 3.0 version was put into use, replacing the imported system for 90 million subscribers of this network in Vietnam, before being deployed in markets Viettel invested in in Asia, Africa and America.
vOCS 4.0 began development at the end of 2020, following Cloud Native architecture. Two years later, the system served its first million subscribers and by 2026 was ready to expand to serve more than 100 million subscribers.
One of the breakthrough points is that vOCS 4.0 has the capacity to process more than 300,000 transactions per second, equivalent to more than 1 billion transactions per hour, with a latency of less than 5 milliseconds. Compared to the previous generation, this system is announced to help reduce hardware investment costs by 50%, shorten deployment time by about 30% and triple the speed of adding new features.
vOCS 4.0 is located simultaneously in two data centers about 2,000 km apart; If one site goes down, the other site automatically takes over and restores service in under 2 minutes.
To achieve this performance, Viettel High Tech representative said that they own and self-develop the core technology layers of vOCS 4.0, such as the native cloud computing platform (Cloud Native) built according to international telecommunications standards, the management and coordination architecture of virtualized network functions (NFV-MANO), and real-time billing processing technologies, subscriber data management and account balance.
According to Mr. Nguyen Minh Quang, General Director of Viettel High Tech, this solution can simultaneously serve networks from 2G to 5G and fixed services on the same platform. Business units can configure their own packages according to a standardized template, combined with automatic testing, thereby reducing the time to bring a new package to customers from a few days to a few hours.
"vOCS 4.0 is ready to meet the needs of domestic and international carriers to exploit the value of 5G and digital services," Mr. Quang said, emphasizing the importance of the billing system, where all business policies of the network are converted into real-time revenue.
VHT said that in the past three months, they and partners in the ecosystem such as Viettel Network and Viettel Telecom have completed converting this network's mobile subscribers in Vietnam and about 5,000 packages to the new vOCS 4.0 system. The conversion process takes place right on the operating network, without interrupting service. They also brought this solution to Viettel's 10 foreign markets, and are ready to sell to other international networks.
Luu Quy