Standards Watch : IPDR and CIBERNET Cooperate on Billing and Settlement Standards

Most wholesale settlements are settled manually, and currently there is no automated method of accounting and settling on the wholesale side. However, the increase in IP applications and ensuing third-party content partnerships is driving the need for automated reconciliation between the CIBER, MXP, TAP and IPDR formats.

With one-to-many relationships, multiple settlements are expected to turn into a confusing patchwork for carriers. Strict accounting rules will be the only way to handle hundreds of thousands of transactions, as carriers will have to track and validate payments at the event level if they are to know what amount to pay and to whom.

In recognition of that imminent need, IPDR.org and CIBERNET—which was recently spun off from CTIA—have joined forces to standardize billing and settlement at the carrier level.

“Once mobile providers hit critical mass with IP-based applications, true reconciliation will be necessary before settlement, and manual processes will be implausible,” says Mary Clark, vice president of operations at CIBERNET.

According to Clark, the top six carriers predict that in 12 to 18 months they will look at automated wholesale settlement as a critical issue. “As their business models evolve, and they hash out what value-add is as opposed to what is packaged in fixed-rate plans, they will then consider how wholesale billing records will capture details to feed into CRM, billing and marketing information systems.”

Finding Synergies

“Where IPDR is built to capture network usage information, MXP is being built to perform the wholesale settlement between parties,” says Steve Cotton, editor-in-chief of IPDR.org.

IPDR handles all services from voice to video-on-demand, so as IPDR captures data that relates to the service, MXP ultimately will capture the data needed for billing and settling those services.

CIBERNET will ensure it can utilize information in IPDR’s wireless schema to handle settlement through MXP, its XML-based billing exchange format for mobile Internet and m-commerce wholesale transactions and support revenue assurance as well as the repudiation (reject and return) capabilities for invalid or incorrect billing exchange. Because MXP was designed for revenue assurance in a wholesale billing environment, there is authentication of carrier-to-carrier or carrier-to-partner exchanges. “So much in that process is reliant on what can be captured at the network element level,” says Clark, adding that “the beauty of the IPDR schema is that it captures as much detail as possible.”

It is expected that with MXP, there would be little, if anything lost in the mapping to IPDR. “MXP has the fields to accommodate multimedia and data applications,” says Cotton.

Possible Obstacles

It won’t be an easy task, as both organizations concede there are differences to overcome. For one, IPDR was developed from a network element and subscriber perspective, making wholesale billing exchange a challenge.

To get past those challenges, CIBERNET and IPDR have begun to hash out synergies so that wholesale-related data can be captured in IPDRs. The first step will be to map IPDR usage information to MXP records. For this to be successful, billing, mediation and BSSs must be able to successfully manipulate the usage data for settlements, explains Snow. “As a service is rendered in an IP domain, the infrastructure will have to shed an IPDR, and the mediation system will have to go to the service providers’ billing systems, where the settlement transactions will be determined,” says Cotton.

Once the specification is built, the hope is that billing companies will implement that transformation to and from MXP and IPDR. With many IPDR members now examining the settlement process in the IP world, the CIBERNET process for traditional voice will evolve to handle IP applications, which all expect will be driven by Wi-Fi technology.

What It Could All Mean

With newer services such as Wi-Fi, different settlement record formats for voice will have to support IP-based services. IPDRs will have to be sorted out at the interface so that hotspot providers and wireless carriers domestically and abroad can settle. “Hotspot providers want to stimulate business by enabling more access to their services with less friction to consumers through open roaming agreements,” says Clark, explaining that ISPs will increasingly try to forge deals with the major wireless carriers to bundle their Wi-Fi services into wireless packages.

“When users roam into various hotspot locations with their laptops, they will punch in their wireless phone number for access and get charged for the service on their wireless phone bill rather than have to pay a separate hotspot provider,” says Snow.

“Pressure will then be on the carriers to capture and reverse bill for information they have distributed on behalf of those multimedia companies,” says Snow.

That requires a “flowback” of information to hotspot providers’ billing systems.

At CTIA Wireless 2003, CIBERNET demonstrated some hotspot application prototypes as it announced deployment of MXP within ComArch’s TYTAN billing system.