The ICT industry is notorious for recycling old ideas and concepts and that would seem to apply to converged charging systems (CCS). These first surfaced at least two decades ago in the context of integrated or consolidated billing for voice and SMS texts, at a time when the latter generated significant revenue and mobile data was still in gestation. CCS also enjoyed investment as operators increasingly launched prepaid as well as postpaid tariffs and wanted to be able to integrate billing and charging for both within the same system. CCS has re-emerged recently, and to be fair has a distinct new meaning for the 5G era, with the focus now being on converged online and offline billing, with a view…