Blockchain in the Telecommunication Industry

Blockchain has become somewhat of a buzzword in the past few years, and it’s said to be leading the fintech industry into the future.

By definition, blockchain is simply a distributed ledger of sequential transactions. It is the underlying technology on which cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum are built. So what’s blockchain got to do with Telecoms? Well, blockchains are not only limited to cryptocurrencies but also have vast applications across many industries. Contrary to bitcoin like networks, private blockchains or permissioned networks can allow multiple parties in an industry to transact and share information without making it public to everyone. This mix of distributed transactions and maintaining privacy between trusted parties makes blockchain interesting for businesses. This is what the finance industry is exploring and in this post, we’ll explore its applications to telecoms as well.

Blockchain for Telecoms

Telecom companies are used to building private networks like SS7 or GRX. Blockchain could be a good addition with less technical and special knowledge requirement to share information that is not already readily available between operators.

Some possible use cases of blockchain in telecoms could be:

Call Detail Record

If blockchain is a ledger of transactions and Call Detail Record is a telecom transaction, then it makes sense at first to store CDRs on a blockchain. Raw CDRs on the other hand might be too much data to be stored on blockchain. Some operators can do as many as billions of CDRs per day. This does not make blockchain a very useful application.

Replacing Roaming Reports (HUR/NRTRDE)

A roaming operator is responsible to share subscriber usage data with home operator via NRTRDE standard. Even though NRTRDE is fast and the information is shared within 4 hours, a global blockchain between trusted operators could replace even NRTRDE.

A shared subscriber identity database

An idea could be to provide each subscriber with a unique ID on a global blockchain network shared with operators. As operators move more towards Digital BSS they can let subscribers of other operators transact based on that ID. For example, a subscriber can transfer prepaid balance from its own operator to a subscriber on another operator. Balance transfer within the same operator is a common application in Asia where prepaid is the most common type of subscription.

Since mobile operators have verified the identity of their subscriber, sharing parts of that identity can let subscribers do a lot of other different things like transfer of money or send chat messages. Fraudulent subscribers is another piece of information which can benefit all operators.

A case for Mobile Number Portability

Typically each country has its own way of managing its number portability database. The set of APIs and access mechanisms can differ per country. The delay in the updating of records also varies.

Moreover, a company outside of the country may not have access to such a database. In the case of SMS, an operator sends a lookup (SRI) to get information on a subscriber to the operator based on the number range, which is then relayed to the current operator in case the number is ported.

This causes slight wastage of resources and redundancy of operations.

Blockchain for MNP

What if all the number portability transactions are stored on a global blockchain accessible by all the operators? This would mean that each operator has the information nearly in real time. This means that there is a distributed ledger of number portability transactions accessible with a common set of APIs all over the world. This can help an operator decide the best route to get to the subscriber and can also increase reliability of service.

Hyperledger for Blockchain

Hyperledger is an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. It is a global collaboration, hosted by The Linux Foundation.

We have created a simple MNP blockchain network using Hyperledger Composer that explains the network functionality.

Try out an MNP network

A sample network is attached and anyone can try it in their browser.

Steps

Download the mnpnetwork.bna file from here https://github.com/faizann/blockchain-mnp/raw/master/dist/mnpnetwork.bna

Visit https://composer-playground.mybluemix.net/

In the Define tab import the mnpnetwork.bna file.

Create 3 participant operators with following info

mccmnc:20404 name:vodafone

mccmnc:20416 name:tmobile

mccmnc:20408 name:kpn

Create a subscriber

msisdn:1234

name: steve

originalOperator: 20404

currentOperator: 20404

Submit a transaction

msisdn: 1234

mccmnc: 20416

You will see the transactions in the ‘All transactions’ list, and event is triggered with the information as well. When you look at the Subscriber in the assets you will notice that currentOperator has changed to the 20416 which is T-mobile. You can create as many such transactions and see the whole trail in the transactions.

Addendum

Blockchain technology has its own pros and cons. Distributed nature and validation is great but the speed of transaction processing will always be slower compared to the traditional databases.

Source code

Full code is available at https://github.com/faizann/blockchain-mnp