Billing Q&A with Jim O'Neill

Although the global wireless industry continues to grow through increased roaming agreements and wireless consortia, incompatible billing systems and signaling protocols, multiple roaming standards and multi-mode handsets continue to impede seamless global roaming.

Efforts to resolve these barriers are underway because potential revenue growth has caught the attention of the wireless industry. In fact, roaming revenue in the United States has been steadily climbing, reaching $3.5 billion in 1998, says Erasmo Rojas of Ericsson. Nearly 38 percent of calls that originate in South America go to the United States and Canada; another 26 percent go to Europe and Asia.

Global market is unifying

Other experts believe global roaming agreements will expand to $11 billion by 2003.

The February GSM/TDMA interoperability agreement between the Universal Wireless Communications Consortium and the GSM Alliance will help unify more than 80 percent of the global wireless market, Rojas says. He also wants to see more roaming agreements between GSM and UWCC associations; the creation of a billing transaction exchange and settlement mechanism; robust fraud detection and prevention efforts, and customer care for roaming subscribers.

There are indeed some billing humps to overcome before seamless roaming can be achieved on a global scale. First, there is the incompatibility of billing systems worldwide. “For instance, a carrier in Argentina wants to roam with one in Venezuela. The impediment is that in any of these things, the usage that occurs in the visited system needs to be identified, measured and turned into a line item on the customer’s bill,” says David Diggs, vice president of Cibernet. “And there is a wide range of billing systems in use internationally, so that can complicate the process. How many of them are using billing systems that were brought over by the LEC or PTT? And some of those are idiosyncratic compared to what’s been developed elsewhere in the world. Some special modifications [to the systems] are needed to handle that.”

How to get it on the bill

“The mechanics of getting something on the bill that says you owe 300 pesos, or shillings, is likely to be different for each billing system, and that can be real easy or possibly very hard. How do they take the roaming records and integrate them into the subscriber’s bill?” he says. “In the United States, everybody pretty much understands how that’s done within the AMPS world. When you’re using a GSM carrier, you have a different concept of operation.”

Different protocols around the world also impede seamless roaming. Billing systems typically don’t care whether the minute of use is TDMA or AMPS, but it does affect the way call detail records are generated. It’s different within the GSM environment. Most roaming records within the AMPS environment are exchanged using CIBER. The GSM community uses Transfer Account Protocol (TAP), and it comes in different flavors—TAP-1, TAP-2, North American TAP, and so on. “It’s like Macintosh is AMPS and GSM is DOS. It’s fine if you stay within one of those two, but jumping the fence between the two requires some conversion, such as killing off fields.”

Getting signaling protocols to communicate

And there are different signaling protocols, which need conversion methods so they can speak to each other. “You have all these different networks; in North America, we’re pretty stable on SS7, but there are different flavors internationally, such as C7 or CCS7, which are similar and not insurmountable if you can get these things to leap,” he says. “You can do a protocol conversion on it, get one to talk to the other; it just needs dealing with. It’s not a particularly daunting barrier.”

Another hurdle: “If a carrier wants to do call delivery, you need to present a temporary locating directory number (TLDN), and the field in the current version of ANSI-41 is limited to 10 digits. How are you going to do that if you have country codes, and all those other numbers you have to dial?” That’s being worked out in the chief standards bodies. For the AMPS standards, that work is being done in TIA’s TR-45.2. There’s also progress in the “internationalization” of ANSI-41, such as how to accommodate enough SS7 point codes.

Four Latin American countries—Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay—obtained seamless roaming capability in 1998, says William Thompson, director of sales for BellSouth International Wireless Services (BSIWS). Six more Central and South American companies will have seamless capability by the end of the year, he says. This expansion in large measure has been the result of BellSouth International’s support of the Pan American Roaming Consortium (PARC), which also has members in Pakistan, Russia, Israel and the Philippines.

“PARC” here and make a call

Unlike typical North American roaming agreements, PARC has a single roaming agreement that allows all new members to roam seamlessly with other PARC member markets and with North American markets that have agreements with BellSouth. The contract has sufficient flexibility to let each member establish its own roaming rates between markets, Thompson says.

BSIWS provides the clearing process for all roamer transactions and interfaces to the Cibernet net settlement process. Ironically, many U.S. wireless companies still do not recognize the growing demand or the financial opportunities available with international roaming, Thompson says.

For all the progress that has been made, there are still some challenges to roaming in Latin America. Currency fluctuations can affect pricing and profitability; to stabilize those fluctuations, all settlements are made in U.S. dollars. And then there’s the political climate and uncertain government policies. For example, some countries have decided to impose taxes on home subscribers who have incurred roaming charges elsewhere, which amounts to double taxation.

During a panel discussion on global roaming at the recent Wireless Partnering International Roaming Conference and exhibition sponsored by Cibernet and the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA), delegates described the state of wireless roaming in their respective countries.

The conference brought together wireless professionals from North and South America, Europe and Asia to discuss the barriers to seamless global roaming. Representatives from each country discussed wireless roaming efforts in their respective countries. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, India, Japan, Thailand, Korea and Hong Kong sent representatives after receiving Cibernet trade missions to South America and Asia last year, Diggs says.

The Brazilian initiative

BCP Communications, a subsidiary of BellSouth Mobility in Sao Paulo and northeastern Brazil, experienced one of the most rapid expansions in telecom history when it signed up more than 1.2 million subscribers last year. But the explosion in its subscriber base led to an immediate demand for roaming capability both in Brazil and internationally.

The BCP formed a three-pronged approach to accommodate wireless users. In the first phase, BCP now receives CIBER in-collects from United States carriers for BCP customers who roam in North American markets using dual mode AMPS/TDMA handsets, says Gordeiro Bernades, product manager for roaming and long distance at BCP. Customers travelling abroad can use their handsets and obtain automatic access using a calling card or PIN number. They can also send or receive calls with the option of blocking incoming calls while roaming. Brazil is a calling party pays country, which makes incoming calls a non-issue in subscriber home areas.

The second prong will see the ability to process out-collects for similarly equipped North American customers who roam in Brazil and other South American countries. A third phase, to handle European roaming, will be accomplished once GSM/TDMA handset issues are resolved.

As interest grows, there will be a push to manufacture such phones. “I think there was a sense within the market that we’d never come out with a handset that will operate on three different RF bands with multiple technologies,” Diggs says. But phones are becoming more sophisticated and multifunctional.

“With the chip set, the best example of that is the Nokia 6100—there’s a phone that operates on 800 MHZ and 1900 Mhz, operates TDMA and AMPS, and it has among the best battery lives out there.”

“I think we underestimated the handset manufacturers’ ability to cope with those issues,” Diggs says. As more and more people buy such phones, the logic of building a multi-modem handset and the economics of that become more attractive. "We may reach a time when there is one phone, and inherent in it all of the prevailing standards, on all of the prevailing technologies, and you just activate those that you need.”

Mexico pushing hard for digital

Mexico is pushing hard to develop digital wireless to overcome the reluctance of some U.S. analog carriers to permit roaming between the two countries, says Alejandro Orvananos, chief commercial officer of Pegaso PCS of Mexico. Mexico, at the same time, has done more to support global roaming than many realize, says Michael Verstegen, vice president and general manager of the North American Cellular Network (NACN), an international network that supports roaming using SS7, X.25, IS41 and GSM protocols. The NACN covers about 7,000 cities in the United States, Canada and Mexico, including Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. Although Pegaso subscribers can roam in U.S. markets with some assistance, they can connect to their own customer care centers automatically.

NACN’s early vision of regional centers of interest has shifted, as new forces create new requirements for the support of global roaming. For instance, NACN members witnessed huge increases in traffic initiated by South American users, Verstegen says. And because some 3G technology is emerging rapidly, and some existing gateways have all the requirements for 3G operations, NACN plans to eventually include full-feature and multiple service offerings for international roaming.

Japan works aggressive digital program

Japan is also rapidly migrating to digital technology, says Takashi Tokita, executive director of NTT’s Global Business Department at DoCoMo. The company wants to migrate from analog to digital and eventually to IMT2000 technology, Tokita says. Japan, with 25 million wireless subscribers, is a major roaming market. Although current PDC technology is somewhat restrictive, Japanese subscribers like its features. DoCoMo will probably stay with it until 3G technology decisions are finalized; handset rental requirements continue to somewhat constrain roaming in Japan.

India builds roaming agreements

G.G. Chowdary, managing director of Satyam Inc. of New Delhi, has witnessed the recent growth of cellular in India. Satyam, which means “truth” in Sanskrit, was formed in 1987 as a software services, management consulting and electronic commerce company. It is a clearinghouse for Indian carriers and has interfaces with Cibernet and Dan Net, a clearinghouse in Denmark, for message exchange and financial settlement services. Satyam represents 50 percent of Indian operators.

India moved aggressively into cellular services after deregulation and the nation’s adoption of GSM standards in 1995. Unlike the United States, where financial exchange is unregulated, India faced government regulations that required approval for each foreign exchange transaction. More “telecom-friendly” regulations and blanket authorizations have led to settlements modeled closely after North American settlement agreements. India now has more than 1 million subscribers and is expected to have 6 million by 2003.

Chowdary believes that international roamers in India, with rates comparable to those in the United States, will have major advantages over those who use high-cost hotels and land-based services for telephone calls.

According to Chowdary, the Satyam/Dan Net/Cibernet consortium acts as:
? Facilitator of international roaming
? Mediator for bureaucratic and regulatory issues
? Educator to new entrants to roaming
? Clearing and settlement house

Fraud protection also an issue

Many nations are also concerned about fraud. “There is an unwillingness of any carrier, no matter where they are, to enter into a roaming agreement without some controls that restrict exposure to fraud; that’s a definite barrier,” Diggs says. “For a long time there weren’t those kinds of controls available.” Some of the international carriers, particularly in Latin America, have more recent antifraud mechanisms. “Their phones are capable of authentication,” Diggs says.

Access to near real-time call detail records using the ANSI-124 signaling standard, more commonly known as Data Message Handler, is essential in the battle against fraud, says Diane Sammer, president and CEO of Systems Link. Carriers that lack fraud detection capabilities are reluctant to sign roaming agreements with high-risk areas, she says. Investing in fraud detection products not only prevents theft, but lets carriers use CDRs for service measurement analysis, including usage patterns and dropped calls, Sammer says. Using such systems to monitor home subscriber behavior is a great tool in detecting possible subscriber fraud, as well as churn.

Key ingredients missing

According to some experts, other ingredients must be in place before seamless global roaming can occur: wireless intelligent networks, which will take time to develop, and technology that will let carriers support prepaid services across platforms. The availability of multiband, multimode handsets also is vital, says Mark Powell, Motorola’s GSM marketing director (see sidebar). Global users, he says, also will want the same services they have at home: seamless, one-number service, one handset with a universal AC adapter, inexpensive calls to home, access to e-mail and other data services, and eventually a single international directory.

Beyond message exchange

The wireless future includes not only voice, but also international roaming services such as paging, satellite, Internet access and personal services bundled into the roaming package, says James Driscoll, vice president of EDS’s Communications Industry Group, Wireless Division. Using that scenario, the clearinghouse function will expand beyond message exchange and settlement reporting to partnership profiles, tracking and accounting for each business relationship, and other support needed to link service providers.

Interoperability

Ericsson’s Global TDMA wireless systems worldwide include 33 countries in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific. Such a network requires that all of the network nodes (Mobile Service Centers) know the point codes—or addresses—of every other node, have dedicated SS7 connections and grasp the difficulty of expansion, says Jose Alvarez, regional manager for Ericsson.

Managing such roaming would take three principle steps:
? Aligning the network to manage node issues
? Aligning end users by migrating from IRM/MIN to IMSI to identify handset units to eliminate numbering conflicts evident in international roaming
? Attacking the different global mobile standards issues through introduction of a true “World Phone” and mobility gateways.

Numbering issues

Systems are being deployed throughout the world with duplicate system identifiers (SIDS) and mobile identification numbers (MINs). That will severely restrict automatic roaming for some areas until IMSIs are deployed. Lori Messing, director for technology resources at CTIA and a member of the International Forum for AMPS Standards Technology, says network manipulation will continue because some network systems won’t deploy new station identifiers until well into the next century.

There’s a great business case to removing the barriers to international roaming. Joy Nemitz, a vice president at GTE Telecommunications, recommends solving technical issues between roaming partners, creating roamer agreements that clearly define connectivity/feature use, and a common settlement process to speed access to profit.

GTE’s analysis of the Latin American market shows that reluctance to roaming is diminishing, although intraregional roaming now represents 5 percent of revenues in nine of 22 countries. Magnet markets have far higher percentages. Nemitz puts it this way: “The tools are there—make your choices and go for it!”

But not everyone thinks “one world, one phone call” is necessarily a good thing. “There are two ways to look at it,” Diggs says. “One group feels we need a universal global standard, that we’d be better off if we have just one standard. There’s another community that says, ‘No, most of the advancements we have occurred because of competition.’ ”