Case Study: China Unicom achieves accurate real-time billing and faster service restoration with Altibase

China Unicom - Customer Case Study

China Unicom, the third largest telecommunication provider in China with 125 million subscribers, faced serious prepaid billing problems in its Online Charging System: its legacy DBMS could not detect negative balances or terminate service promptly, could not reinstate service quickly after payment, and provided stale balance information. To address these issues China Unicom evaluated Oracle TimesTen, solidDB and Altibase and selected Altibase’s in‑memory database feature for accurate real‑time billing.

Altibase was deployed in 2010 as an in‑memory only database (on an IBM P6‑570 with 16×4.7 GHz POWER6 CPUs and 156GB RAM) and integrated via a standards‑compliant ODBC interface with only two weeks of development effort. As a result, China Unicom can precisely check and act on balances, system latency has been reduced, service termination and swift restoration on payment are reliable, balance inquiries are accurate, and customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention have improved while attrition is minimized.

China Unicom