Executive Profile: Ike Elliot, Senior Vice President, Level 3

Investors are going wild over IP. The thought of putting anything and everything over Internet protocol (IP) networks is shaking the industry and is forcing industry players to look at the future of telecommunications. Level 3 Communications announced in January that the build-out of its U.S. and European networks is ahead of schedule, with near-completion of the U.S. network expected by the end of this year. The company is already offering its managed modem service providing more than 2 billion minutes every month for that utility.

One of the greatest challenges in offering services via an IP network is developing a business support system that wraps around the network to capture and track usage and ensure revenue gains. Systems that not only do that, but also interoperate to provide end-to-end customer order, provisioning, billing and network information, are vital to the growth of the next-generation provider. Whether Level 3 can bring the IP network home remains to be seen.

For now, according to Ike Elliott, senior vice president of global softswitch marketing, Level 3 is restricted to using Signaling System 7 (SS7) interfaces with its softswitch technology to furnish information about the services it provides. These services can be rolled over to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) in case of IP network failure. The technology still must mature for companies to deploy stand alone IP networks, Elliot says, but he argues that suitable quality of service is available now with the PSTN as a backup.

Elliot explains Level 3’s use of the softswitch technology and how billing information is captured within its network.

Billing World: The softswitch combines features of the Internet and traditional voice networks. Could you explain more about how it works?

Level 3: The softswitch emulates the circuit switch on an Internet network, without using any circuit-switching equipment. We use softswitches for traditional voice or managed modem services. In a voice service example, we interconnect with the SS7 network so we can receive standard, traditional telephone call signaling. The signaling comes into the softswitch, which controls voice over IP gateways. They convert time division multiplexed voice versus IP packet multiplexed voice, and egress our network on the other side to another media gateway, all under the control of a softswitch. The softswitch takes the stimulus to set up a phone call from the SS7 network, and it controls the IP network to set up that call over our packet infrastructure.

BILLINGWORLD: What are the benefits of the using the softswitch technology?

Level 3: First, softswitches are 40–45 percent less expensive than their equivalent circuit switches, and we expect that prices for softswitch equipment and software will drop at a more rapid rate than prices for equivalent circuit switching equipment. … In the time it takes circuit switching to double in performance, softswitch equipment will have doubled in performance 16 times for the same price. What that means is softswitches are not only less expensive today, they are poised to become much less expensive over time. Second, softswitch technology is based on open protocols and interfaces, so that you can write your own software for your own services if you want to, without having to pay the monopoly circuit switch provider to make changes in his equipment. You could even imagine a day when customers on the network can write their own software to control their own network services.

v Third, reliability is an advantage, because the softswitch is distributed; we can use what is called in the industry “N+1 redundancy,” which says we can always have a spare server on the network to make sure the service does not go down.

BW: Can you explain the advantages of the architecture?

Level 3: One of the advantages is the cartonality of processes that you put into the network. As an example, we have to have SS7 interfaces in our network in order to make this voice service work seamlessly with the public switched telephone network. We do not have to deploy SS7 interfaces in every city in which we offer service. That’s different from circuit switching. In circuit switching, you put in a circuit switch, and you have to have an SS7 interface on that circuit switch. We put SS7 interfaces in a handful of cities—just enough to achieve redundancy, and the amount of capacity you need. That resource can be shared across our distributed IP backbone by all of the sites that need SS7 connectivity. So, it reduces costs and [provides] very high-reliability service, while being able to distribute components in the exact amount that we need, and not necessarily by being forced to put in hardware everywhere just because of the design of the old circuit switch.

Another advantage is that a circuit switch is composed of a circuit-switching matrix with line cards and trunk cards connected to it and a switch controller. All of this is integrated into one box into in one room. Because you cannot connect all 250 million telephone users to one circuit switch, you need hundreds of circuit switches across the country. In order to actually switch a circuit from any one user to any other user, you need a hierarchy of circuit switches operating on multiple levels. In other words, you are forced to put in extra circuit switches (tandems) that do not serve any end users, but only serve to switch traffic between circuit switches. This involves a hidden cost. With the softswitch architecture, we replace the circuit switch matrix with our IP network. It’s a big flat switching matrix, and we can switch any-to-any connectivity without putting in tons of additional, expensive equipment.

BW: If the quality of service drops below the standard that Level 3 sets, it automatically rolls over from the IP network to the circuit-switched network. Could you explain that a little further?

Level 3: We can roll traffic over to the public switched telephone network using a technique we call hairpinning. If a call comes in … and if our IP backbone is down, we can still tell the call to be routed to its final destination … through what we call an off-net carrier through a traditional circuit-switched carrier, who can carry the traffic the rest of the way. That is basically done on the very edge of our network. Our media gateways have the ability to take an incoming call and hairpin it right back out to another carrier to carry the rest of the way. In other words, it’s kind of a hot potato kind of thing—“I don’t want it, you take it.” We can tell our network to do that if conditions in the network warrant it.

BW: When people say that quality of service is a big issue for an IP network, does the ability to hairpin make that a moot point?

Level 3: I believe it does make it a moot point, because certainly we will be measuring our own quality on our own network, and we can hairpin the traffic before quality becomes too bad to do so. Now if you want to say we can carry all of the world’s traffic on IP by itself and don’t need circuit switches at all in anybody’s network, I think we’re a few years away from that. We need that safety net while the technology matures. BW: In stating that the technology needs to mature, is the softswitch really a transitional technology as we move toward next-generation networks?

Level 3: I don’t believe the softswitch is a transitional technology. In its most generic form, the definition of a softswitch is that it controls a communications network. It doesn’t exist only because we need it to interface with SS7; it exists because we need a control element for IP networks, no matter who we’re interfacing with. The softswitch fills that role. The SS7 network interface is transitional. I think that the control aspect will always be needed for this class of service and for voice services in general. There are a lot of reasons for that—one of them being that there needs to be information in the network. If you think of wireless networks today, you can roam with your cell phone. If someone calls your cell phone, it still rings even if you are not in your home territory. That is because the network stores information about where you are. There’s always going to be that need to have a control element in the network.

BW: How are you able to bill on an IP network, and how is the softswitch technology involved in that?

Level 3: In a circuit-switched network today, a circuit switch does billing primarily based upon the signaling messages it sends and receives. It will get an SS7 message coming in, which is usually called an initial address message, and it has all the information that eventually ends up in a call detail record, such as call number, calling party number, the time the call is being placed, the trunk root on which the call is being placed. In our network, because we have this SS7 signaling interface, we receive other signaling messages that tell that circuit switch when the ringing started, when the call was answered, when somebody hung up and who hung up. Those are all the pieces of information that go into a billing record in a circuit switch today.

In our network, because we have this SS7 signaling interface, we receive all of the same signaling messages on our softswitch and create the same kind of information records for a downstream billing system. So, it’s really not all that different. We happen to be using an IP network for transport, but we are able to capture all of that same information. Also, we can cut information about what’s happening with that call as it happens, and send that information to a server on our IP network immediately. We get a much more real-time view of calls in progress, not just necessarily information that resulted from a call after it was over. That can be very helpful in preventing fraud. Circuit switches generally do not do that.

BW: If a customer wants to come online to order a service, how is that integrated with the different systems so that information is tracked and the services are implemented? Level 3: Generally, what happens is we take the order on a Web site. That order is sent to a data distribution system to update all of our softswitches. There are other tasks that have to be kicked off, and there is a workflow management system that handles more of the manual tasks in case any are necessary in response to that order. We distribute this information to the softswitches, the softswitches process calls, cut billing information and send it to a mediation system, which has access to the same database of customers that was updated by the order. We employ fairly standard information technology.

BW: Level 3 is involved in the Softswitch Consortium; what is the consortium doing, and what are Level 3’s expectations from that?

Level 3: The consortium is heavily involved in interoperability. We held an interoperability event in Dallas, testing media gateway control protocol (MGCP) and session initiation protocol (SIP) interoperability—two of the open protocols in the softswitch architecture. Those protocols are the key areas where the Softswitch Consortium is making a difference. We are defining interoperability agreements among all of the membership. We are developing a permanent test lab so all of our members can use that to do interoperability testing. We intend to create a branding program so that once somebody has interoperability tested with the standard test suite, we can brand their product with a brand that has meaning—one that has been Softswitch Consortium-tested. … That is what Level 3 really expects from the Softswitch Consortium—for the group to really add value by creating a broad community of interoperable suppliers of components in the softswitch architecture.

What technologies will dominate next-generation voice networks is one of the hottest issues being debated in telecommunications. This month’s profile defined Level 3’s approach, including the development of the softswitch and its networking concepts. Next month, Billing World publisher Dr. Jerry Lucas will present another perspective about the evolution of the voice network.