As carriers seek to meet the rising adoption of text messaging and rich media content, they’re re-evaluating their systems with an eye toward building economical and strategic mediation capabilities. They’re also positioning themselves for the enterprise market, where growth is slower, but demand will increase steadily. Sprint, for instance, recently launched a wireless business platform aimed specifically at businesses with a large mobile workforce. Sprint will have to rely on mediation systems that can handle any combination of makes and models of handheld devices including cell phones, PDAs, wireless laptops and Blackberry pagers.
Though “convergent” mediation systems are becoming the rule, a surprising number of large carriers still have their original mediation systems in place, and buy or build adjuncts to these systems or create separate systems to handle IP and wireless platforms. Likewise, carriers can end up with more mediation systems than they need—systems they inherited through mergers or acquisitions. In many cases, carriers are trying to reduce the number of mediation systems they have.
Each mediation system is supported by a database, and the more databases the carrier uses the more opportunity there is for fraud, says Rakesh Shukla, business manager for mediation at Hughes Software Systems. “The customer’s name can be posted in the IP database, the wireless database and another mediation database. That’s three places where fraud can occur.” For more on mediation’s role in curbing fraud, see “Fighting Fraud, Abuse with Mediation”.
There is a lot of work and expense ahead for carriers looking to streamline those systems.
“We’ve seen carriers with as many as six mediation systems in place at one time,” says Jonjie Sena, director of product management and architecture at Ace-Comm. “Right after a merger they may end up with a few of these systems. They sit down, and they try to choose one mediation system for each of their [platforms], and because mediation systems aren’t cheap, there’s a process they go through to eliminate the old systems. You don’t just pull the switch and everything is over.” (See “Using Mediation to Migrate to New Billing Systems”).
Nothing less than the operator’s business plan, network evolution and future marketing strategy must be considered when choosing which mediation platforms to keep. The age of the network, future acquisitions, and the kind of applications the operator needs to support customers should be well understood before determining which mediation platforms to keep.
Active vs. Passive Mediation
Active mediation describes a system of mediation functionality that interacts with the subscriber. In this scenario, it’s the mediation system that defines the event, not the network elements, though network elements record event records for collection by the mediation system.
Active mediation includes the ability to authenticate and query users over a handset and initiate sessions in which the system presents a series of choices to a subscriber. Active mediation platforms can determine whether a subscriber has enough money in his account to order more services and other details.
A stable of active mediation systems have been developed by vendors that still handle simpler passive mediation, too. Because many carriers still rely on multiple mediation systems, companies like Comptel, Openet Telecom, Ace-Comm, Intec Telecom Systems, Narus and Amdocs—which finalized the acquisition of Xacct Technologies in February—market their active, convergent mediation systems with the pitch that they can reduce the cost of maintaining multiple mediation systems and accompanying databases. Many have various pedigrees of IP mediation systems, too, able to work with VoIP and cable broadband requirements.
In the last few years, carriers have been requesting that mediation systems be more active in the provisioning of service. “They wanted interaction with the customer, controlling the session with the customer. In active mediation, the challenge is extreme; the primary focus is to control the subscriber’s session from a charging perspective,” says Joe Hogan, the founder and CTO of Openet Telecom.
Convergent mediation systems are designed to work under all kinds of business rules and agreements. “The difficulty is not in the collecting, it’s all the complexity of the services that are being deployed. You have to pull all kinds of data off multiple parts of the network, and it can be packets, it can be cells [video], it can be frames, bytes; the system should give you every option.”
The carriers now have a way to check their databases to see if the subscriber had enough money in an account to pay for the ring tone or other service when they ordered it. It allows other functions, such as asking the customer via the handset if he wants to subscribe to a service, or deny a subscriber access to a service if he doesn’t agree to pay for it.
However, there is danger with such interactive, or active, mediation systems. “The reliability of active mediation systems is vital,” Hogan says. “If the mediation solution in the background traffic crashes, if it’s active and screwed up, the service is down. But these active systems are hardened to deal with the load on the network,” he says.
Mediation Performs OSS Tasks
By recognizing certain subscribers and creating rules by which the sessions are conducted, the operators now have tools to manage subscribers. You can, in effect, perform customer service tasks, conduct payment queries, and OK the subscriber for the provisioning of services—clearly OSS and customer service functions. “We’re starting to see a lot of that type of information, where the lines between mediation and the downstream systems [OSS] are starting to migrate up,” Sena says.
Carriers want that automated meshing of live subscriber sessions, SMS-enabled customer permission, and quick provisioning of requested services without the expense of using a CSR.
Active mediation platforms can also give the operator a near real-time view of the network; mediation systems can be adjusted to cut records for the operator as often as the network managers want. But the intervals can be set too close together, says Ty Roach, the engineering manager for Ace-Comm’s Convergent Mediation platform.
“The collection interval is an added thing that we do, every 10 minutes we’re going to cut a file that’s going to let us see what’s going on—a timeframe that’s reasonable to batch up data. It’s arbitrary and it’s configurable for the operator.” To prevent a bottleneck of event messages, record-cutting intervals are set based on traffic volume and the number of switches, gateways and application servers that create the records and send them downstream.
“If you make [the timeframe] real short, then you are constantly processing check-pointing information. You can run into trouble if you make the queue too long; if you have an outage you have to go back and process that information,” he says.
The mediation platform, with its ability to collect event records from a number of collection points, can alert operators when a subscriber’s service level agreement is not being met. This is important for carries with enterprise customers that have large bandwidth requirements and rely on an always-on wireless network. For companies like Sprint, however, which wants to sell its wireless network so medium and large enterprises can extend their desktop applications to the field, such service level agreements need to be backed up with reliable quality of service (QoS) reports.
According to Sprint, network mediation will play a large role in recording billable events and managing the reliability of its wireless network, including the deployment of an automated alert system that will contact IT staff when problems pop up.
Comptel: Helping Operators Transition to GPRS
Another sector of the industry has been shopping around for new mediation systems: wireless operators migrating from TDMA platforms to GPRS.
New mediation systems enable those operators to process the new kinds of data while keeping their legacy TDMA billing systems, says Jaakko Soininen, president of Comptel. The cost associated with the transition doesn’t have to be so great if the same billing system can be retained—there’s no need to oversee a big migration of customer records to the new system, says Andrew Johnson, Comptel’s regional manager. But moving to a GPRS platform requires configuring and mapping the rating engine to the billing system.
“They have to do new rating for all the new products, and they have to configure all that in the new billing system,” Johnson says. And the TDMA billing system, used to measuring usage in seconds and minutes, now has to handle bits, bytes and other values. The mediation engineers have to translate, or map the values in the old system to new data events in the new system.
“We can take the data items in the new system, [per message, bytes] and mimic the minutes of use [MOU],” Johnson says.
“One way to think of it is, if an SMS costs a dollar,” Soininen says “and their average MOU is 10 cents a minute for a call in the old system, we charge the customer 10 minutes of use … which gives the billing system the dollar charge for the SMS.”
Sampling Records Reveal Network Performance
Mediation vendors say their systems can give operators an indication of how well downloads or other subscriber events perform through sampling the records from servers that push the data to the subscriber and other “collection points.” Wireless operators can also adjust IP mediation systems to alert carriers when QoS falls below a certain parameter. The same records can be reviewed periodically, such as when network technicians change shifts, or at the end of the month.
Setting up mediation systems to manage performance begins with planning.
The operator begins by assigning values for its QoS levels, prematurely ended IP sessions and other events. This is again an arbitrary exercise as a way to create a point of reference for technicians who manage these things. All the enterprise customer knows is the image or sound quality is bad, or that a Java game won’t download completely, or email won’t open on his handset. When the subscriber calls to complain, the operator can look at the record of the event and determine what happened. Successful completion of downloads and sessions, usage, air time and other records collected by mediation can identify the kinds of content downloaded, record authentication information, and pinpoint interrupted IP sessions and jittery video streams caused by packet loss.
“Operators offering VoIP service may adopt a quality index of a 3, or 3.5, to measure a combination of jitter, echo and delay,” says Eric Troup, senior manager for telecom media and entertainment, at Capgemini. “You might not be able to measure every single call in real time, so you have to take periodic sampling for that customer.”
Carriers want VoIP service quality at least equal to that of the PSTN; if the caller can’t tell that his call is traversing a VoIP network, the operator can claim success. “They’re trying to keep VoIP over a 3,” Troup says. “There’s a known degradation, and if it falls below a 3, the service isn’t good enough. There are two issues there: service assurance, that is, measuring what you’re delivering, and knowing that you can bill appropriately for that service.”
While one subscriber accepts a 3 as an acceptable level of service, another may prefer a 3.5 QoS. The IP mediation system is tasked with collecting data created by those call events (hundreds of thousands a month) from network collection points and sorting them by QoS levels or SIP designation or by phone number for billing purposes. Mediation systems can be programmed to match information created at the beginning of a call, search the switch data for the second half of the call and combine the information into a single call before sending it to the billing system. Multiply all those VoIP calls, and combine them with the multitude of other records from SMS, MMS, email, ring tones, MP3 downloads, traditional voice, wireless calls—and one begins to understand the complexity involved.
Mediation Records Can Indicate Revenue Leakage
“Once you establish a session, you know the session is established,” says Intec Telecom System’s Ben Samuel, director of wireless business line, of how mediation clues in operators. “Something happens to say ‘Ben has tried to access the ring tone.’” According to Samuels, if the session is interrupted through a dropped connection, etc., it collects partial information, such as the IP number of the subscriber, but may not record what the subscriber tried to do—download email, send an SMS, etc.
Some operators may throw out such partial session records but others keep them for later review to determine if a pattern of incomplete records, however slight, exists at certain collection points. Those network devices may be slowing and imperceptibly leaking revenue. “It’s not the noticeable hits that worry carriers,” an expert says. “It’s the steady drip-drip of an undiscovered revenue leak that concerns them.”
Can active mediation systems determine how much the customer should be reimbursed? Not very well, Troup says.
“How do I know I’m delivering on the SLA I promised? Whenever the customer complains, [operators] just make an adjustment to the bill, but there’s no way to tell how the complaint from the customer should be valued,” he says. “What is 80 percent of X amount of bandwidth? There’s no way of knowing if they got that level of service or not. So if the customer is complaining, operators just err on the side of caution and pay something on the rebate.” Referring back to the operator’s acceptable QoS for Internet telephony at 3 or 3.5, if the operator sees that packet loss brought the QoS to a level of 2, the operator can reduce the VoIP portion of the bill by a percentage acceptable to the customer.
Billing for Access Can’t Be Determined
Neither mediation platforms, which can collect event data from switches, application servers and other network collection points, nor SS7 probes that read the signaling layer, can determine if a VoIP call originated on a POTS telephone or a SIP phone. This may be unwelcome news as the FCC struggles to determine whether VoIP providers have to pay other carriers access charges. The commission has determined that Pulver.com, for instance, doesn’t have to pay other carriers access charges because it relies on peer-to-peer networking and doesn’t hit the PSTN.
Identifying the type of network on which the call begins is vital; billing systems have to know immediately which of its subscribers’ calls are subject to access charges. “Mediation just can’t tell,” Troup says. “There’s a lot of confusion about what you can bill for based on the difference between enhanced and standard services. If you can figure out the charges in real-time as you’re doing the call, you can make fast and good routing decisions.”
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Fighting Fraud, Abuse with Mediation For Rakesh Shukla, business manager for mediation with Hughes Software Systems, it’s a fact that IP mediation systems can bring fraud to its heels on a network. He recently gave a presentation on the subject at TeleStrategies’ ISS World sessions in Washington, D.C. in early May. “In the circuit-switched telephony environment, which is deemed well-protected,” Shukla says, “revenue loss to fraud is about 3 percent to 8 percent of the carrier’s revenue, or $40 to $50 billion a year globally.” IP-based services will provide even greater opportunities for fraud, due to the lack of built-in security mechanisms, he says. |
Using Mediation to Migrate to New Billing Systems Mediation systems, because of their ability to manipulate information about services, customers and network information, can be used as a temporary depository for information being moved, stored or pulled out of the billing stream.The biggest thing to remember when moving those oceans of customer billing data from an old billing system to a new, more complex billing system is that you can’t stop billing to do it. If you stop billing, all that data (millions of records a minute in some cases) produced by the switches and other network elements piles up with nowhere to go. So both the new and the old system have to operate in parallel during the switchover. Mediation acts as a way point—in the migration from the old to the new billing systems. “The easiest way to get a new system up, whether it’s billing or whatever it is, is to handle all of that through mediation,” says Mehran Moghaddam, vice president of engineering for Ace-Comm. “From our point of view, what we have to do is start collecting from their new network elements. It’s a case where you have to continue to feed the old system and support the new system at the same time so they can’t just switch the system over.” “Once they’ve decided [to move to the new system] they have to start implementing it,” says Jonjie Sena, director of product management and architecture at Ace-Comm. “That’s where the mediation functionality comes in.” The mediation system stores the old data—names, dates and other customer and network data as the information is moved between the two billing systems. As the old information leaves the old billing system, it enters the mediation system, and the tables are updated with new information. “The first thing is to collect everything [billing and other information off the active network] and feed it to both of the billing end systems,” he says. “Then the next step is to start eliminating one of the end systems, in this case the older billing system. And that again, happens gradually over time, so the data is supported through mediation systems during the transition.” The carrier’s got update tables in the mediation system, so as the operator takes customers from one billing system to the other, all they do is update that table so the mediation system is correct. “Neither one of the billing systems cares about what has to be modified,” Sena says. Though migrating to a new billing system can take as little as a couple of weeks, operators should take the time to do it right. Billing technicians should make sure they have the bandwidth to do the job, Moghaddam says. “We had a case where the customer was adding multiple network devices, and they also had multiple, secondary billing systems. They got to the point where they prepared their primary billing system and ran out of capacity. They could only have so many subscribers on that.” |
