IP Hardware Builds Some Billing Muscle

IP-based services are a major way for wireline and other CLECs to increase their value to customers, and in the past several years most major network equipment and traditional switch vendors have made a brisk business of selling IP switches and routers to the carrier market.

Although IP network elements do enable a whole new set of services, such as voice over IP, video on demand and multimedia applications, traditionally these products were built to move packets quickly and not for much intelligence beyond that.

Because IP switches and routers were built from the ground up to funnel packets to and fro as fast as possible, they are not necessarily able to determine which user used what services or convey highly granular usage-based information.

Sophisticated IP services, however, are nothing unless the carriers can measure usage and appropriately bill for it. Although IP mediation vendors have popped up to fill the void in correlating IP service information with specific customers, hardware manufacturers are starting to realize the importance of the output their equipment provides.

HARDWARE LIMITATIONS

IP hardware can bridge the circuit-switched world with the packet world, or it can send packets over an IP-only infrastructure. While the network products are flexible in the type of traffic they move and over what kinds of networks it flows, they are severely limited in providing detailed information about what exactly they are transporting from place to place.

"IP devices only recently have been conceived of as things that generate revenue," says Richard Kagan, vice president of marketing at Narus. "The devices and architectures haven't caught up at all with what you need to do to be a good accounting device as well as a good packet-moving device."

Kagan adds that IP hardware devices are entirely unaware of what's flowing through them. "They do a good job of counting how many bytes moved from this port to that port, and products like Cisco's NetFlow can even tell you some information about the IP flow," he says. "But there's absolutely nothing in any IP switch or router that's there for the purpose of understanding that a particular user is using a particular application with a particular quality of service. Those devices are focused today on moving packets as fast as they know how."

One of the problems for switches and routers is that IP addresses by nature are dynamic, says Dave Tung, CTO of Magardi, a company that focuses on fraud, revenue security solutions and intercarrier settlements. "Because of that, it's really difficult to match that up with a subscriber," he says.

The output that an IP switch or router can deliver is usually a very basic AMA or flat file CDR that contains little more than start/stop time and volume of packets passed. Also, data available from devices such as IP switches and routers can be in Management Information Base (MIB) format, which uses Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) to access it.

MIB defines very basic information such as the number of packets that have come in since a particular time, which IP addresses the data moved between, or administrative information about a router. Remote Monitoring (RMON) is a MIB extension that can capture more detailed data from devices and network segments, but it still can't produce all the information necessary to accurately bill for IP service usage.

A step above MIB and SNMP would be something like Cisco's NetFlow, which captures and aggregates traffic details from many of the company's routers and switches. Although NetFlow is a definite step toward increasing the level of detail in hardware output, it's not without its constraints. "NetFlow is a higher animal than MIB, and while it does look at IP addresses and ports, which can be a very crude indicator of some applications, it's still quite limited," Kagan says.

When customers start demanding service level agreements (SLAs) and the ability to be charged on very detailed information such as QoS, service providers have to dig deeper to collect billable data.

THE VIEW FROM UPSTREAM

Because IP switches and routers have been limited in the type of information they can provide to upstream systems such as billing, mediation products have stepped in to pick up the slack. Even if a switch or router can only give amounts of bytes passed from here to there, it is still possible to create a billable usage-based record from that slim bit of information.

IP mediation products such as those from EHPT, HP, Narus and Xacct are marketed as being able to go beyond data collection and to actually take information from various areas of the network and create a usable record that will make sense to a billing system.

"Mediation vendors are able to take bits of information from many different sources and make the necessary associations to produce the granular view that's required by service providers," says Vikash Varma, program director of HP's Smart Internet Usage. He adds that one of these sources of information is the session source, which helps figure out who had an IP address at a particular time. This can be through RADIUS servers or another device that keeps track of sessions.

"It's not just how many bytes, but how many bytes relate to a particular application like a video conference or photos of a summer vacation online," Narus' Kagan says. "These are very different values and different QoS levels, and ultimately people will pay accordingly."

Kagan goes on to say that this ability to charge for many different parameters depends on instrumentation that is application-aware, and in order to extract that information the switches and routers have to have visibility. "There is no IP routing or switching or other device that has application-level awareness in its ability to account for sessions," he says.

In an ironic twist, if hardware manufacturers do add in the ability to produce more granular information, performance of the network element will suffer, Varma says. "That's the trade-off, but there is a workaround that involves adding more processing power and memory to the device, and that results in a higher price point for routers and switches," he says.

Interestingly, even if routers and switches today were able to output sufficient details for IP billing, those records would be in different formats anyway. Most of these devices support AMA or other Bellcore formats, but each vendor tends to have its own proprietary extensions to that, making it all the more challenging for mediation systems. "There are a number of different proprietary formats, and no standards," Kagan says. "But it's kind of the tail wagging the dog, because it's only an issue to talk about standards when there is useful information coming. The real issue is, there isn't a lot of information coming out of the devices that's worth having."

Dave Tung of Magardi doesn't see the proprietary use of AMA records going away anytime soon. "Most switch manufacturers want to have some degree of control within the switch, because for them it's competitive in nature," he says. "I don't really think we'll have true compliance; it'll be compliant with extensions, and that makes it more difficult for mediation devices to work."

Varma says that although output is still largely proprietary, "one of the more shocking things is there are a whole bunch of equipment vendors who don't generate any accounting records," he says. He adds that performance and granularity are always issues for equipment vendors, a topic that's been discussed within the IPDR Organization. IPDR has the potential to be the end-to-end standard for IP usage records, but so far equipment makers haven't embraced the up-and-coming standard in the same way OSS vendors have. (For more on IPDR's association with IP switches and routers, see "Switches and IPDR.")

IP mediation platforms may be able to take rudimentary data from IP switches and routers and make some sense from it all, but the general trend in the industry is for the hardware makers to do their part and start providing many more details for mediation and billing systems to work with.

HARDWARE MANUFACTURERS STEP IN

When you look at data sheets or white papers on hardware vendors' Web sites, rarely will you find detailed plans for how the products capture usage information for upstream applications such as mediation and billing.

Yet the hardware vendors aren't ignoring the importance of IP billing and are making sure their service provider customers can capture usage information and bill for it.

Switch maker Extreme Networks has made usage-based billing a priority, even going so far as to post a technical brief on the subject on its Web site. The company's Alpine 3804 and 3808 switches can track a wide range of statistics, including traffic generated by specific applications, total traffic to and from specific addresses, overall usage for premium services, and peak utilization.

In addition to collecting very detailed metrics, Extreme's switches have APIs that work with OSS products from Narus, Portal Software, Syndesis and Xacct. "You can couple our switches with popular OSS software, so while we don't actually do higher level billing software, we do provide the interface so those packages can hook to our equipment," says George Prodan, vice president of worldwide marketing at Extreme Networks.

Prodan adds that when the company first introduced its switches in 1997, the priority was to create a scalable product that allows for bandwidth allocation and traffic prioritization. After delivering those features, the company realized that people would want to be able to charge for those and other parameters. "We had the idea to do this in 1997, but the first product wasn't there at that point. It was just a matter of time before our customer base would start asking for it," he says.

Cisco Systems is also placing great emphasis on dealing with upstream software systems. "Integration with OSS/BSS is a critical element, as far as our overall strategy goes," says Alan Cohen, senior director of marketing in Cisco's Communications Software Group (CSG).

The company divides this effort into three areas-instrumentation, accounting and billing-with its main focus on instrumentation and accounting. On the instrumentation side, the company's Content Delivery Network (CDN), which was announced in August, is focused on outputting extremely granular information. "This output is so granular, so you can indeed bill on this detailed level, including having modifiable rate plans," says David Kirsch, business development manager in Cisco's CSG. "One of the key things in CDN is the output feeds back into billing and rating, and reconfigures the network and delivery infrastructure to make service providers more profitable."

Cisco is working with a number of mediation vendors, including HP, Narus, Opnet Technologies and Xacct. The company is relying on established standards like RADIUS to produce the detailed information that the mediation platforms need. "Years ago when Cisco started getting into the telephony and gateway space as well as IP-based access services, we implemented a wide number of systems using RADIUS," Kirsch says. "We are normalizing our RADIUS infrastructure to simplify what it takes for upstream systems to be able to do their jobs, and we're making it so the same record means the same regardless of platform."

Kirsch says that RADIUS is a good choice, because it is used for start/stop activities like call duration. Cisco is also supporting Diameter, an IETF Internet-Draft that's described as an enhanced RADIUS. Like RADIUS, Diameter is an authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA) protocol. It will likely be deployed between service providers and corporate networks, but may take longer to get to edge devices.

Lucent Technologies also sees the need for IP billing functionality in its hardware products. Even though the company also makes billing and mediation products, due to the overwhelming number of heterogeneous networks (on both the hardware and OSS side), Lucent is working with other vendors, including Telcordia, so its switch/router products can interact with upstream systems.

Although the company sees the value of making it easier to bill accurately for IP services, it's finding that the subject is a low priority among its customers. "They seem to be, at least from our perspective, billing traditionally," says Michael Meyers, 7R/E product marketing director at Lucent. "They haven't made that a priority that we would generate that kind of data." He adds that while Lucent's switches really haven't changed in terms of the format they send to upstream systems (Billdats), there is a lot of interest in adding information such as QoS and then billing accordingly.

In addition to the traditional IP hardware devices, softswitch technology is also a likely source for detailed usage records (see "The Softswitch Connection").

Some hardware-based IP switches may be able to generate partial CDRs, which could be useful to mediation and billing systems, Tung says. "Many systems would like to know when things begin or are initiated, as well as when they end," he says. "I think right now the focus is on the end point, whereas I think in the IP world knowing when something starts and then being able to proactively do something differently to it, like reroute and change QoS, would probably be of some benefit to upstream systems."

In this type of situation, during the middle of a call the switch could push out a partial CDR, and then when the session ends the switch could create a complete CDR.

Tung adds that other upstream applications like fraud detection could benefit from knowing when a service is being used.

DELIVERING FOR THE CUSTOMER

When we talk about usage-based billing, the focus inevitably turns to the OSS applications that must collect usage details, rate them and bill for them accurately. As crucial an area as that is, those back-end systems could use a little help from the network element side to be able to collect even more robust information. Without cooperation and development efforts on the part of IP switch and router makers, their service provider customers may find themselves at a standstill when they want to roll out sophisticated IP services in the near future.

Sidebar

The Softswitch Connection

IP switches and routers are slowly being enhanced to keep better track of usage information, and the same pace seems to prevail on the softswitch side, too. Softswitches, as the name suggests, are software-based switches for packet networks that have the same level of reliability as traditional telephony switches.

One of the big selling points of softswitches is the time to market on new services. Traditional Class 5 switches can require many months to implement a new service, while softswitches can do the same in less time.

Even with the increased flexibility of softswitches, generating sufficient detail for billing systems has proven elusive. "The granularity of softswitch data depends on the kind of softswitch you're talking about," says Dave Tung, CTO of Magardi. "It depends on the level of emulation the softswitch has with its hardware counterpart." In other words, companies that make a softswitch that emulates a 5E switch will probably have CDRs in an AMA type of format. Other vendors might be a bit more proprietary in terms of the data they generate.

"It depends on what they are trying to do with their softswitch," Tung says. "Are they trying to be a hybrid with IP on one side and traditional voice on the other side, or are they doing total IP to IP?" He says that if a softswitch is pure IP, generally the products can produce a richer record than if it's a hybrid.

Tung says that most softswitch vendors haven't gone further than generating Bellcore AMA records, although some can generate them in real time.

Products that were created from day one to be softswitches-as opposed to being an emulation of a traditional switch-stand a much better chance of being able to support a richer format such as IPDR, but even that probably won't happen for some time.

Many softswitch vendors today are focusing on getting their products to work with large call volumes, rather than creating richer data records. "It just seems they've got a bunch of battles to fight there first, in terms of scalability and robustness," Tung says.

Sidebar

Switches and IPDR

The IPDR standard, which will result in an XML-based record format for IP services, may not be complete yet, but it already has the potential to change the way service providers deliver new services.

Today, most leading billing and mediation companies are members of the IPDR Organization (IPDR.org) and are working to support the emerging standard, but that support isn't as strong on the hardware side.

The accounting information that IP switches and routers do generate is generally in proprietary format such as AMA, but in the future that could shift over to IPDR. Yet even if the idea of having a single format from network element all the way upstream to OSS/BSS applications has an appealing ring to it, it still has a long way to go.

Today, support for IPDR can be found mostly between the mediation layer and applications such as billing, customer care and fraud detection. It's not something you see originating from the instrumentation layer (within switches and routers) and then being passed upstream. "IPDR has up until now been from mediation on up," says David Kirsch, business development manager in Cisco's Communications Software Group. "But when you talk about content services, this is probably the place where an originating IPDR stream from the IP switch doesn't mean anything yet." He adds that Cisco is relying on mediation platforms to provide details such as user information.

"Within IPDR.org, we've had this discussion about equipment vendors having to generate IPDRs from the devices," says Vikash Varma, program director of HP's Smart Internet Usage. "That's a good thing for a wish list, but the impact of generating an XML-based rich data record will just kill the router," he says.

A few hardware manufacturers such as Cisco have joined IPDR.org. Cisco hasn't been very active in the group, choosing instead to support its partners who are dealing much more with the standard. But once IPDR becomes the common way of representing IP usage, end-to-end use of the standard will probably get on the fast track within the OSS and hardware communities.