The evolution to subscriber centricity

In the last decade we have seen technology changes and new ideas to help us to effectively design distributed, extremely scalable and carrier grade directories with response times for read and write operations in milliseconds. Such directories have enabled the telecommunications industry (operators, service providers and equipment and software providers) to create a subscriber centric view even for real time and mission critical telecommunication systems as a Home Location Register (HLR) or Home Subscriber Server (HSS). The paper describes various aspects about the used technologies and the main technical challenges, the solution principles and the key characteristics of a subscriber repository. One key topic is discussing the possible evolution strategies from a fragmented subscriber data to subscriber centricity. In addition, the paper explains the benefits - technical and commercial - for operators and service providers and discusses the benefits for other industries. In particular the paper gives an outlook of the next technical evolution using virtualization and cloud computing.