Wireless Access Billing: Make it Right

Editor's Note: In the May issue of Billing World magazine, we explored how CLECs are turning to automated reconciliation systems to keep tabs on access billing (Page 42). This month, we've peeked into the world of wireless/wireline reconciliation to learn how disparate switches, formats and other vagaries can lead to lost revenue.

Times have certainly changed for wireless carriers since the Telecom Act, and that is not necessarily a good thing when you are talking about reconciliation. Today, wireless carriers have to handle numerous traffic types with a variety of standards and switch-signaling formats. They offer many kinds of new services, and no longer sign interconnection agreements just with ILECs. Hundreds of CLECs have jumped into the game, giving wireless companies myriad interconnection possibilities to track and bill. Much like the wireline side, wireless carriers are losing money on faulty CDR and rate data, and can’t keeping billing databases healthy enough to track the mounting interconnection agreements.

So it's a good idea, say industry experts, that the first place to look for problems is by studying interconnection agreements and how they jibe with CDRs and billing.

Old contracts, new world

Some carriers still have contracts dating from the passage of the Telecom Act, when wireless call volume was lower than today. Wireless carriers signed interconnection agreements based on those low-volume calling patterns.

"With the passage of the Telecom Act in 1996, wireless carriers were able to recover access revenue for carrying LEC traffic, so they immediately went to a percentage basis and assumed the [bulk of] traffic flow,” says Linda Hermansen, director of business development at GTE Telecommunications Services Incorporated (GTE/TSI), which developed the Access Revenue Management system. "Today, when a wireless phone may be your only phone, combined with large, unbundled rate packages, long battery life and so on, wireless carriers are terminating more traffic and therefore entitled to significantly more access compensation than their original agreement would have provided for them."

Wireless carriers sought discounts from LECs

Rather than putting together more sophisticated billing systems, wireless carriers "rushed to figure out how to get a discount on their LEC bill. They still knew they were going to be net payers," she says.

Though it sounds legally viable to negotiate a new contract, it is sometimes difficult. "They can attempt to write a new agreement, but the inertia of the original agreement is sometimes tough to overcome, and the amount of sophistication of some wireless billing systems to provide traffic data can sometimes be a challenge," she says.

Wireless carriers don't file tariffs like wireline carriers, so they have to find a way to set fair interconnect rates. If a wireless carrier charges too low an access rate, for instance, it can work against itself, because wireless carriers can now bill for traffic on behalf of other carriers.

"Wireless carriers could do a couple of things to set their own interconnection rates," says Bill Schaefer, manager of business development at TSI. "They could continue to use the contractual relationship with the LEC, or they could mirror wireline tariffs. But most wireless carriers have decided not to mirror wireline tariffs, because they want to view themselves as being somewhat deregulated," he says.

"A wireless company can also perform a cost study, based on traffic volume, such as money it invested in equipment to terminate traffic. You calculate what it costs per call, and how much you need to recover based on a per-transaction, per-volume basis," he says.

Access or interconnect?

Once an interconnection rate is finalized, the wireless company must find a way to sort the traffic type and its origination.

"A wireless carrier needs to determine the carrier that terminates traffic on its network in order to send a bill," says Yves Robinson, of InformationView Solutions, Inc. "They also need to be able to control which companies are billed and which are not, based on their interconnect contract status."

Determining whether a call is for access or interconnect is critical, he says. "The methods used vary, depending on the switch type, or whether the carrier identification code (CIC) is available on the CDR or not." Wireless carriers can examine routing methods, such as asking whether terminating IXC calls to the tandem are routed, searching dedicated trunk groups, or matching LEC-provided CDRs for tandem routed calls, Robinson says.

"You really have two different [billing] components - minutes of use and rates," says Schaefer. "Wireless carriers can compare rates by looking at agreements. In terms of MoUs, they are going to have to look at traffic that's terminated and recorded. Billing staff can understand where the traffic came from by looking at the calling party's number. If the wireless switch or billing system is not recording that traffic, you have to get those records from the tandem owner. You use those records to compare the minutes they terminated for wireless against what the ILEC said was originated by them. So you check for discrepancies at that point."

So many formats, so little time

Another problem tracking calls for reconciliation: disparate formats, standards, CDRs and switch types hurt efforts track and define call types, Schaefer says. "I don't think there is a good reconciliation device out there. In terms of reconciliation, it's a market opportunity."

"Standardizing CDRs from different switch vendors and dealing with the anomalies of each switch is a common problem for both wireline and wireless mediation devices," Robinson says. "However, the wireless environment offers new challenges as well, such as switch-to-switch transfers."

For instance, when a driver talking on a cell phone drives past cell towers on a long stretch of road, the call may hit several switches during the drive. "Imagine that one of the towers has a switch attached to it," Robinson says. "The switch records the call, but the call is handed off to another switch with a different format farther down the road. That wireless switch may or may not generate a full CDR record, and won't make it past mediation. Technicians sometimes have to combine data from both switches to record the call's full duration.”

More vendors need to wake up

"I think it's an area a number of vendors are beginning to address," Schaefer says. " You don’t have just AMA switch formats switching hands. You have a series of proprietary wireless switch formats. Those need to be converted to a to programming standard switch format or standard record format. Vendors need to stand up and provide the ability to convert one record format to another so there can be a common reconciliation format."

Hermansen agrees. "There are signaling differences. I have 41 versions, with SS7 being the first,” she says. “The signaling differences don't always translate into mutual compensation, or meet-point billing differences."

But differences in signaling and formats don't always mean lost revenue, she says. "Because the switches are recording the call detail information, they can record it independent of the protocol used to transport the call," she says. "To a certain extent, it's more a function of how they have established their recording capabilities, and also how they have approached their interconnection agreements."

Revenue loss can be found at the switch

Kirsten Bailey, product line manager for Comarco Inc., of Irvine, Calif., says testing and updating the switch is a great step toward revenue assurance. Comarco develops field measurement products that tests cellular and PCS network performance. One product, Revenue Assurance Product (RAP), tests switch reliability, among other things.

"If any type of call is not recorded on a switch, that's dropped revenue right away," she says. "But the problem is harder to identify. When other switches are working properly, it's tougher to find that dropped call."

And then there's the switch manufacturers: "When the switch manufacturers upgrade or introduce new software for the switch, the carriers will roll those out, and the changes in the AMA can have a negative effect on mediation and billing," Bailey says. "Anytime a change is made to the software on the switch, that's a big chance for loss, to carriers have to track those changes and validate it. Sometimes the switch manufacturers tell them they made nine changes, when they actually made 10 changes," she says.

Reconciliation works best if the carrier has the data in the first place. Here are a few places to look for revenue loss, according to Bailey:

call records may not make it to the mediation device and on to billing;

a CDR field is mispopulated; for instance, the mobile number is recorded incorrectly; call routing is recorded incorrectly;

a new trunk group is added but the billing system is not informed. The billing system will automatically reject that trunk group;

the network group makes programming changes at the switch but does not indicate the changes downstream.

Convergys will use nodes to identify traffic

Convergys, which performs wireless end-user billing for AT&T, Ameritech, Alltel Communications and other major wireless carriers, is working on better ways to capture different kinds of wireless transmission, including IP packet data, short messaging and circuit-switched, high-speed data.

"Our future direction is to support any service that can be offered over a wireless phone," says Robert Hritsko, director of wireless marketing. "Typically the CDRs we get are circuit-switched. When you begin introducing different data services they often add different service nodes in the network to capture that - independent of the switch or integrated with the switch," Hritsko says. "The challenge, from a mediation standpoint, is to talk to these service nodes - then we'll have enough data to determine type of usage. Our strategy, from an efficient billing perspective, is having a master proprietary format record that will represent each of the various services.

"Once we can standardize the format, we can process that record of data and process it to the right customer account and eventually print it on the bill," he says. "By standardizing on the front end, you eliminate all kinds of special processes around proprietary formats, such as Alcatel's versus a Cisco Router, or Lucent 5ESS'. The sooner we can standardize that, the better off we'll be."

Separate databases can lead to revenue loss

Wireless carriers often store local and long-distance data in separate databases, which can make it difficult to bill properly for terminating calls, Schaefer says.

"Anytime you have two different databases, you've got the issue of data integrity. What you have to ask yourself is, 'When was the last time one or both of the databases have been updated? What kind of adjustments or treatment has been done to that database, which the other one may not reflect?’ When you are set up with parallel databases, you make it more difficult to reconcile, absolutely.

"If the wireless carrier's not recording some local calls in a database, but is recording all of its long distance calls, that carrier has to go to the tandem owner and get the call data," he says. "There are some issues there. If everybody was recording originating and terminating traffic the same way, in common databases, it would certainly facilitate record exchange, billing, and reconciliation."

Meet the Meet-Point Problems

Mutual access and meet-point billing are traditional approaches to recovery of access revenue when a carrier uses another carrier's network to complete calls.

"They decide a common meeting point, a common place of exchange where upstream of that it belongs to one carrier, downstream it belongs to another carrier," Schaefer says. "So if one is terminating and wants to bill off that termination, there's a certain amount of infrastructure downstream of that meet point where they can recover access."

However, says Hermansen, "If you haven't provisioned your local and long distance as separate services, and you don't participate in meet-point billing with your LEC, you may not be able to determine on the terminating end which was carried by an IXC and which wasn't, because you're not being passed the carrier identification code. The key is to have the engineering staff focused as much on the need for data collection and billing as they are on call completion," she says. "The challenge of data collection and account assignment are further complicated by the increasing presence of CLEC traffic, making more sophisticated approaches to database management and billing a necessity."

Other Ways to Lose Billable Calls

Roaming presents new challenges to access and interconnect billing systems. "A roaming mobile unit always presents its real 10-digit number in the CDR," says InformationView's Robinson. "A traditional billing system will look at a call from a California NPA-NXX to a New York NPA-NXX as a long distance call, when in fact it might be a California telephone roaming in New York, making a local call," he says. "These situations must be properly identified and in some cases the CDR modified to fool the billing system."

There are also difficulties determining the appropriate scenario for billing a call to a mobile phone that was forwarded, Robinson says. "If a call is made to a mobile telephone that is forwarded, is it eligible for terminating interconnect charges? If it is forwarded long distance, can the wireless carrier also charge access? Different opinions apply, because wireless carriers are often not considered LECs," he says.

And then there are the switches themselves - sometimes calls get routed wrong, or are not recorded at all. Much depends on how old the equipment is and how well engineers configured it, Hritsko says. "In switching, wireless has the added challenge of dropped calls, especially if you're in the middle of a call and the handoff between cell sites doesn't occur,” he explains. “The calls get dropped and you get an incomplete call."