LIVE FROM MWC21 BARCELONA: Public cloud advocate Danielle Royston fleshed out details of Totogi’s initial product portfolio as the start-up officially launched at MWC21, hot on the heels of her $100 million investment in the company tipped to revolutionise the way operators interact with customers.

Speaking to Mobile World Live ahead of the official unveiling in Barcelona, Royston said Totogi was designed to offer a dedicated approach to telco software, running its services purely on the public cloud through Amazon Web Services.

She said it differed to rival telco software options because Totogi had the capability to run services for its operator customers on the public cloud and, crucially, there was no option for it to run anywhere else. “It cannot be run on- premise, it cannot be run on another public cloud,” she explained.

Royston pulled the trigger on a $100 million investment in Totogi in May, shortly after striking a deal to take Ericsson’s floorspace at MWC21 Barcelona to set up Cloud City, as part of a wider push to raise awareness around the technology in the telecoms sector.

Rule them all
Coming to Totogi’s initial product launch, Royston first pushed an innovative charging engine (these typically implement tariffs and rate usage, and are housed on-premise), tipped to emerge as the dominant platform of the sector.

The public cloud supremo pointed to two benchmarks made by rival businesses recently which showed why she believes Totogi had the edge on charging.

The first, published in a study by Oracle, showed its engine benchmarked at 130,000 transactions per second. Rival Matrixx Software revealed shortly after it was able to do 200,000 transactions on the same timeframe.

Totogi was unique in that it could handle a million transactions per second, five-times more than the nearest published competitor, she said.

“The goal is to handle the world’s charging, literally planetary-level charging. Instead of every CSP installing their own charger there’s one charger. It may sound like Lord of the Rings, but the plan is to have one charger to rule them all,” quipped Royston.

Indeed, Royston’s argument is that a charger housed in the cloud can easily scale up or down based on demand. Telcos are used to capacity planning for peak network events such as natural disasters. But with a cloud-based charger they wouldn’t have to plan for this aspect of those peaks.

Next, she touted Totogi’s BSS offering, which is a fully API driven platform, with plans to support all of the TM Forum’s APIs by the end of 2021.

The key to a modern BSS system was an open API system, Totogi stated, allowing users to share information between applications easily, with vendors historically reluctant in the past to open up their systems.

Finally, Royston outlined her long-term strategy for Auto Plan, a new approach to building tariffs for consumers which uses different pieces of data to put together an offer for an individual subscriber.

She explained operators know their customers better than anyone and it was time to shift away from a “one size fits all approach”, to create a personalised plan which would not only get customers to stick with their operators, but create additional value.

Royston said this would lead to a Super App, where telcos would be able to use all the information they have on their subscribers and, in turn, double ARPU.

Pricing
As part of a long-term mission to shake-up the industry, Royston said she would offer a free tier to Totogi’s services, which was common with cloud vendors but “unheard of in telco software”.

For the charging station, 500 million transactions would be free per month, with 500 million API calls per month for the BSS offering.

“We think smaller tier-three operators, with sub-250,000 subscribers, will be able to use both systems absolutely for free,” added Royston.