Mediation Systems: Pressure's On for Usage-Based IP
Susana Schwartz
09/01/1999
As telcos are pushed into next-generation services such as IP telephony, mediation systems will be a key component in the integration of telephony services and data networks and the migration to new billing models.
The question of how to bill for new services is one of the biggest obstacles to the progression of IP telephony and mediation, according to Robert David Workman, product manager for ICL. “As companies begin to offer multiple services such as IP and voice and data, and ATM, they end up with multiple billing systems.”
Workman notes that while companies like Amdocs and Kenan are close to delivering convergent billing across these types of services, operators must still define how to bill customers. “It doesn’t matter yet that the systems capabilities are almost there, because operators are still figuring out their strategy for pricing and rating,” he adds.
“Future applications have a wide range of attributes for which carriers can charge, therefore you will have to charge someone by the amount of bytes he uses in streaming video, or for the copyright of video and title, or even for the quality of video and audio; the possibilities are endless,” says Ori Cohen, CEO of Narus, an initial founder of the IPDR initiative, an industry forum launched to standardize the usage record format. “It’s inevitable if companies are to remain profitable and competitive,” Cohen says.
Until IPDR is ratified, carriers will have to be careful that proprietary solutions allow for migration to standards. However, waiting for an all-encompassing standard to arrive will put a carrier at a disadvantage to competitors that have implemented or are in the process of implementing usage-based billing.
Because there is no data record, such as a CDR, that describes a usage instance in the connectionless IP world, vendors are getting creative. Hewlett Packard can now generate Internet Data Records (IDR) from its mediation platforms. Some VoIP gateway vendors also generate data records from their equipment. In addition to supporting multiple devices and switch types, mediation systems are emerging that support a myriad of CDRs and various AMA-compliant formats. Cisco, CGI, EHPT and OpenCon are imbedding software within routers that generate CDRs based on usage.
IDRs will grow more complex
“However, as more and more intelligent services get introduced on IP networks, the data record will change. The IDRs will become more complex to be able to describe the usage instance,” says HP’s Vikash Varma, marketing and business development manager for SMart Internet Usage, and a lead member of SPDR. “We have seen the same thing happen in the telephony world. Compare a wireline AMA with a GSM CDR to illustrate the point.” Hence, says Varma, traditional players have significant challenges in re-architecting their products to handle the new complex formats and the huge data volumes that IP networks generate.
Similarly, the players will need to scale products to meet the needs of large networks and guarantee the reliability and availability of their products in large deployments.
Various approaches to IP
Several vendors are jumping into IP telephony, including Axiom, with its Sterling 500 and Sterling 5000 series, which collects call usage data and organizes data distribution, respectively; CGI (formerly Bell Sygma), which offers full Unix-based rating and mediation; Comptel, with its MDS/AMD mobile solutions; Hewlett Packard’s SIU product designed for very large networks, EHPT’s Billing Mediation
Platform which supports all service and switch types; ICL, which supplies British Telecom with SIMS-E, a highly scalable Unix/client server mediation platform; Xacct and Narus, both of which provide IP mediation; and MicroLegend, with its SS7/IP Signaling Gateway, which provides a bridge between SS7 networks and IP data networks.
“We see mediation vendors adopting a dual strategy of using direct-connect and non-intrusive methods of collecting data from the data sources,” explains Varma, adding that this will ensure that even where data sources are not “open,” a mechanism is in place to collect and process usage data.
But, he adds, mediation systems are needed to handle non-IP service offerings in these new generation networks, as with voice over ATM, which is being implemented by several service providers. “Hence, mediation platforms will need to handle usage data from level 2 and level 3 devices,” Varma says
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A New Growth Spurt
“We are entering the next growth spurt for mediation. We will see some of the traditional vendors left behind because they are not adjusting as they should. That is why we are not actually seeing event- or usage-based billing yet, but it’s on the horizon,” contends Kim Cole, principal, The Management Network Group, Kansas City. “It’s a chicken-and-egg syndrome as far as who will lead the way. Usually it’s the marketers, but no one has yet said, ‘I will offer QoS-based pricing, or I will price your AOL access based on usage.’ Maybe it will be the underlying switch vendors like Cisco who say, ‘Here is what we can give you,’ and the mediation vendors will adapt to that.”
Cisco purportedly is opening itself to partnerships to promulgate standards in the IP market. “We are trying to build an ‘Internet Ecosystem,’ where companies use the Internet as the tool to build business environments,” explains Cisco executive vice president Don Listwin. He says Cisco’s strategy is more of a collaborative relationship than a competitive one.
Competition not far behind
“In working with large established players in the market as well as the up-and-coming companies," Listwin says, "we will give our customers a choice in choosing which mediation vendor's solution best fits their network architecture and billing model.”
Some vendors are trailing others in the race for the IP space, but no one is getting their heels nipped. Not yet, anyway.
“Talking with traditional vendors, I was concerned about how far behind they were,” says Cole, but concedes that vendors have made considerable inroads in the past few months. “They are no longer turning away from IP; they just aren’t doing stuff in the front rooms yet,” she says. “They are somewhere between 9 and 18 months behind companies like Narus and Xacct.”
Despite the fact such companies are in their infancy, “their ‘pull’ approach will prevail. They lack the enhanced functionality of the traditional players,” says Cole pointing to the fact new players don’t yet have things like a graphical view of the network when adding new devices like a 5E switch, so that ensuing user and output formats can be dragged and pulled down graphically into a user friendly format. Mediation systems should ultimately be the key hub for data traveling from one application to the other adds Cole, “Mediation should be the interface from billing and the data warehouse or financial systems, converting data to what it has to be and passing it on to the next series of systems”.
Mediation vendors, billers partner
For now, Cole believes that mediation vendors will partner with billing companies that are moving into IP billing, as evidenced by companies such as Amdocs, BizTrans, Kenan Systems, Mind CTI, Portal Software and Solect Technology Group. Xacct Technologies (Santa Clara, Calif.), for one, has entered into partnership agreements with 27 CCB vendors, including Amdocs, Daleen, Kenan, Portal and Cap Gemini.
Some of the pioneering efforts toward next-generation mediation are, in fact, emerging in Europe, where telecommunications operators already offer multiple services, such as traditional telephony, cable TV and digital TV. With convergence underway, mediation helps such companies to hash out TV content and event records.
Telewest to Go Usage-Based?
Telewest, the largest cable TV provider in the UK, is preparing to offer interactive services to customers for which it will develop usage- and volume-based rating and billing. In the fall, Telewest will add digital television services to its repertoire of basic telephony, ISDN, Centrex, 800 services, local and regional rate services, and premium rate services.
As a result, Nicholas Bennette, head of IT services for networks and commercial services divisions, is looking at volume-based, bandwidth use for multi-service billing.
“Because of our rapidly expanding services base, we will prepare mediation systems for the IP arena,” says Bennette. Currently the organization is looking at XACCTusage.
Telewest, like many large carriers, is still in the rudimentary stages of reassembling IP for creating billable and chargeable events, mainly because they are hashing out problems related to offering the same level of call detail and accuracy that has existed in the circuit-switched billing arena.
Bennette notes that the company handles 50 million telephony calls a day, “but no one can hypothesize how massive the load will be once we enter the data world. When you put flexibility of choice for services and QoS into the hands of 2 million customers, it increases the magnitude and complexity of records we have to store.”
As a result, Bennette says Telewest is upgrading storage mechanisms and data mining to improve retrieval of records.
Currently, Bennette is looking for intelligent mediation capabilities to facilitate intelligent rating. “We want to add value to the information we receive by indexing certain fields so we can look up that data again at any point in time,” he says. “We have the complete ability to go to the original source to prove fraud, call margins, use of interconnects with other operators.”
As Telewest and other carriers are pushed to the next level of mediation systems, system and network designers and architects, OSS heads and CIOs will hash out how to work within packet-based networks, extracting call information from a distributed network of gateways, routers and disparate devices - a huge change from the circuit-switched billing world.
Future Mediation Challenges
The new generation of mediation devices will have to handle an influx of network elements - industry figures now estimate at least 160 types. As carriers prepare for the IP world, they will see the level of complexity increasing with multiple elements like gateways, routers, switches, log-files, counters, database information and IP flows. Mediation systems will need to collect information from several sources in the IP network, filter copious amounts of data, and aggregate information, all in real time.
“One of the key things we have learned in pioneering this market is that the software architecture has to be able to collect and process data generated from large networks,” says Varma. This means not only being able to collect data in a distributed manner, but also using a distributed data store, which allows for high-level scalability. Varma predicts most centralized database architectures will fail, because “the data volume rates from large networks today overwhelm the most robust databases. High-end scalability introduces significant technology and architecture issues for the largest service providers. To scale down is more a financial and product packaging issue.”
Expediting data access rates
Per-Erik Johansson, product manager mediation, EHPT--which has more than 80 mediation installations worldwide--points to GPRS, which expedites data access rates to 115 Kbps in GSM and D-AMPS networks. “Users will have to be constantly connected, so billing for time will not be sufficient; rather, companies will have to figure out a way to bill for the service, either by volume of data downloaded or sent,” says Johansson. "The mediation system will have to translate ‘X megabytes’ of data into ‘Y seconds,’ and by that you can keep your existing billing system,” he suggests.
With such challenges at hand, carriers are grappling with how to create a richly functional mediation system, independent of hardware specifications, network elements, billing systems and their changing needs.
Mediation's Key Components
Just what are the key components to mediation? David O’Kelly, lead consultant for the Networks Interfaces Group at Logica, Inc., a UK-based consultancy, software and systems integration company, says that “first and foremost for mediation is performance. The mediation system must be fast enough and powerful enough to process at least twice the maximum peak service providers’ through-put levels, both for CDRs and subscriber provisioning requests. If the mediation device's architecture is properly designed these performance issues simply become a factor of the hardware.”
O’Kelly was “recently impressed” by a mediation device from CompTel, which was benchmarked processing nearly the equivalent of half the world's average CDR daily level on one system.
“Flexibility is another core element,” says O’Kelly. “Mediation devices must effortlessly be capable of adapting to new changes in the network, thereby accommodating service providers ever growing and fluctuating requirements and needs. You will find changes are implemented almost instantly in a mediation device, as opposed to the arduous and often costly task of altering kernel billing processes to respond to unexpected network element driven alterations.”
Sungjae Yi, director of engineering for telecom management software vendor OpenCon Systems, Piscataway, N.J., agrees. “If a telco has a wireline switch, such as a Lucent 5ESS switch or Nortel BMS500, and it plans to add a wireless switch from Ikea or Ericsson, the mediation device has to support the new device or switch, and the effort should take no more than a month.”
O’Kelly promulgates fault tolerance. “Automatic recovery for all realistic scenarios is a must, as are retry mechanisms and the intelligence to switch between alternative communication routes for the different network elements and the billing system based on easily configurable rule-sets.” He adds that mediation systems also should be capable of seamlessly integrating into the overall network management support systems whether via SNMP or other such protocols.
Another important component to mediation is “enrichment,” which includes anything from changing a date and time stamp to determining and inserting a traffic case or completing parts of the interconnect billing process, says Johansson, who notes approximately 80 percent of all EHPT installations involve CDR. “A large part of the mediation process involves formatting and re-formatting the CDRs [or translating between the network elements and the downstream systems, such as billing and customer care systems].”
Don't forget accountability
Accountability is another factor, says O’Kelly, who believes mediation devices need to be capable of alerting operators of any potential revenue assurance leaks and to ensure their processing streams are air-tight. “Data is money, therefore, it simply cannot be lost,” says O’Kelly. “Whether it is subscriber provisioning-related requests or the associated data usage information such as CDRs, mediation devices must ensure the safe transmission of data between the network elements and the billing system.”
Yi recommends that service providers’ mediation systems also support multiple information models, whether streamlined AMA, tape AMA, CDR, or other.
EHPT’s Johansson agrees that consolidation of several records will become common. “Long calls generate several CDRs and these need to be merged into one, since many billing system are not able to handle several CDRs for one call,” says Johansson. “It is more convenient to handle this process in the mediation system.” For example, calls that “pass midnight,” – run from 11:59 PM to 0:01 AM - may also generate several records that need to be merged.
Modifying Mediation behavior
Johansson also believes mediation devices should be externally controllable through API or CORBA. “You want the ability to modify the mediation behavior on the fly without shutting down the system and without any code modifications,” he says. He adds that mediation systems should have alarm capabilities and interfaces into network management systems, as well as configurable levels of security for accessing the CDRs via the mediation device, to prevent mistakes by different groups within the organization.
Just how vital is it for companies to incorporate these elements into mediation? During research into mediation systems, Theresa Cory, Ph.D., of Chorleywood Consulting Limited—a specialist management consultancy and information publisher, focused on the area of telecommunications customer care and billing—found that one recently licensed operator who had not yet installed a mediation system experienced a CDR loss of 4.8 percent daily; across the industry, this figure can be as high as 10 percent per day. Says Cory, “The UK-based cable operator, Videotron, estimates that before the installation of its mediation system, it was losing an estimated £1 million in annual revenue through lost call data alone.”
Cisco’s Listwin says that IP mediation will certainly be a necessary part of the network. “When it will see a boom or whether it will be a constant and steady roll out is tied to other variables,” he says. Listwin believes the main drivers for usage-based billing will be wider deployment and use of broadband services, multimedia services over the network - such as voice-over IP and video on demand - and differentiated levels of service offerings.
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