Deadline Looms for Billing Format Change

Beginning Aug. 31, meet point billing summary records and their associated header and trailer records will no longer be part of the electronic messages interexchange (EMI), the call records carriers use to bill each other for access.

And this has put many carriers-especially those that lack the ability to send such records-in a tough spot.

New Records on the Block

The records, known as 11-50-XX summary records, will be replaced by the 11-01-XX standard, which contains more detailed information on transactions. The move is part of the Multiple Exchange Carrier Access Billing (MECAB) version 7 changes and Ordering and Billing Forum guidelines.

"I believe there are a lot of people that do not have the functionality in place to distribute CDRs in message call records," says Gerry Guidry, product director of interconnect carrier access billing systems at Intec Telecom Systems. Such carriers include those with legacy systems and proprietary formats that have to be changed to meet the new requirements.

As it now stands, carrier partners have to wait longer than they'd like to get those records. The change should cut that time drastically. It will enable competitors, or those that lease UNEs from LECs, to create records at the tandem rather than wait for the LEC to send a bill. The LEC can do the recording, getting all its usage from the competitor. The incumbent can then send records to the competitor, who in the past billed the IXC, but now the incumbent can bill the IXC directly from the [competitor's] records, Guidry says.

"There is an upside to this," he says. "If you are the tandem company [competitor] and were relying on the end office company to send you this, I as a tandem company will be doing the billing in some cases and won't have to wait 45 days for the end office."

Andrea Abad, product manager of CABS at CommSoft, says billing staff members have to pay attention to the changes. "The 11-50-XX records use a jurisdiction code to determine the origination and termination of a call. The jurisdictions are coded 1 through 4, which indicates interstate/interLATA, intrastate/interLATA, interstate/intraLATA and intrastate/intraLATA," she says. Under the more detailed 11-01s, billing technicians can use the "to" and "from" numbers to determine origination and termination.

Excluding Non-Chargeable Calls

"If you receive meet point billing tapes from another interconnecting carrier, you need to process this data," Abad says. "You should already have the means to bill Category 11's; however, for any secondary meet point or transit records you process you may need to exclude them from the end office and carrier common lines. Billing departments that send out tapes to interconnect partners have to create category 11 detail records instead of summary records. That's where the most effort is."

Because each carrier may format its switches differently, "the conversion has to be customer specific," she says. "We may have to customize for each customer because they have different services or they provision the switches differently. That's a more intense coding effort there than just processing the incoming records."

Smaller telcos won't have as many difficulties as the larger carriers. "I think you're going to see larger telcos have a problem, because they interconnect with lots of carriers," Abad says. "There is a lot of testing that has to go on, and a lot of back and forth discussions to align the systems."