Source databases-repositories of code used by America's telecom carriers to determine ownership of lines, switches, trunks, central offices and other network elements-lack the accuracy to bill interconnection partners properly. Once a simple list of alphanumeric strings used among members of the monolithic Bell System, they are now challenged with being sophisticated enough to handle increasingly complicated interconnection agreements between competitors and incumbents, as well as wireless carriers.
Even as the overseers of these databases try to get a handle on the complexity, they keep one eye on emerging technologies such as E-911, growing local number portability (LNP) and nascent VoIP networks.
Assignment Data Outdated
Assignment databases indicate which carrier owns certain lines, based on which lines are assigned to the carrier by the North American Numbering Plan Administration (NANPA). Those phone lines, however, no longer stay with the carrier to which they are originally assigned. They are often moved over to CLECs and resellers who win the customer from the incumbent. That continues to be a problem when an IXC, for instance, is trying to determine which telco owns the line from which a long-distance call is made.
"Prior to the '96 Telecom Act, you could derive who the line belonged to from the carrier viewpoint, to determine access and drive end user charges to the appropriate carrier," says Kelly Anderson, senior manager of product and industry relations at Intrado. "Since '96 you can't do that because of porting, reselling and unbundling. The assignment data is not really useful anymore. If I make a long-distance call and it's billed on AT&T's system, AT&T gets the call record off their switch. AT&T looks up my phone number, sees that the number had been assigned to Qwest. But I have since switched to a CLEC that ported or resold, or re-bundled the number over from Qwest. AT&T, using one of the assignment databases, determines that it has to bill me through Qwest, but I'm a CLEC customer." AT&T then has to create a network request and search various databases in the country to find which carrier now owns the number. That process takes time, because it has to be done for each number in the country that AT&T (or other mega-carrier) can't locate through assignment data.
"An analyst at the other carrier has to key in the number individually. With a company the size of Sprint, MCI, or AT&T, that would be very time consuming," Anderson says. Time is of the essence, because carriers face a time limit in billing for those calls. "In Michigan there are only 45 days in which you can bill the customer," she says.
Eric Rock, senior manager for VeriSign's telecommunications service, also sees a problem in tracking ported or resold lines. "The resold lines are a big problem," he says. "If you port lines, it may be inconvenient because you have to go to different sources. For instance, you could go to the line information database (LIDB) or National Portability Administration Center (NPAC) to get the information. If ILEC A has a block of numbers in an NPA/NXX block and that NPA/NXX is pooled or not, those numbers aren't officially ported. When you work at a six-number level, you think it belongs to the ILEC, but it doesn't. You have to get the service provider that now owns those numbers. That takes time."
Coding Schemes Date Back to Ma Bell
The nation's carriers rely on just a handful of source databases, the origins of which date back to efforts of AT&T Bell Laboratories in the 1960s. The Bell System's technical people saw a need for a consistent method of keeping track of all the network elements, including what services it provided and how these elements were interconnected. To accomplish this, according to a report by ATIS' Network Interconnection Interoperability Forum (NIIF), Bell Labs created coding schemes to identify the network components, including locations, facilities, circuits and equipment. At the time of divestiture in 1984, the codes were spun off to Telcordia Technologies, once known as Bellcore, for administration and maintenance.
In 1996, when the Telecom Act came into law, those codes, or Common Language databases, faced an unfamiliar world. How to differentiate between equipment leased or owned by CLECs that interconnected to the RBOC networks? The codes would have to also identify items as large as a building and as small as a single board in a digital switch-and as complex as a customer circuit provided over a high-speed digital transmission path. The codes also have to track those elements as they were provisioned explosively across the once-monolithic Bell network.
Telcordia's answer: to expand the Common Language Location Identification (CLLI) codes to let carriers identify network sites that contain telephony equipment, switching and facility interface or interconnection points, network support sites and customer sites. (See "A Glossary of Code Functions".)
CLLI Codes: Getting Down to Circuit Boards
Most carriers in the United States and Canada use the Common Language code sets for various network data exchange processes, such as access service requests (ASRs), Location Exchange Routing Guide (LERG) and the National Exchange Carrier Association (NECA) Tariff FCC No. 4. Other Common Language codes include message circuit codes, special service codes, facility codes, and so on. Many code sets remain under the ownership of Telcordia.
As Telcordia's vice president of numbering management and routing administration, Rick Harrison has seen the kinds of problems that can arise when carriers lack the data needed to do business. "Companies do miss new code openings," he says. "You have to validate the data and make sure whoever supplies the information is the valid source, or is the true authority for a particular telephone number." Carriers become victims of fraud when the data is not maintained-on purpose or not. "One of the biggest issues surrounds what customers do to get services without paying for them," Harrison says. "Some customers change local service but don't notify the long-distance company-sometimes fraudulently, sometimes without intent. Then the long-distance carrier doesn't know who to bill or can't bill."
Another problem is tracking calls that are ported outside of rate centers. "Whether carriers do it on purpose or not, they tend to port numbers outside the rate center. You're not supposed to," Harrison says. "A carrier could port a number outside of a rate center, and long-distance calls could be made using that number. The carrier would deserve compensation or access for the call, but they would have no way to know those calls took place because they look like local calls."
NeuStar: NPAC Sourcing and Clearinghouse Approach
NeuStar has been the nation's local number portability administrator since 1988. In that role, it operates the call and signaling/routing registry for North America. "We are the LNP database for the carriers," says Maria Marzullo, vice president of OSS services. "Our database allows routing once LNP happens." NeuStar acts as a clearinghouse for carriers, which Marzullo says can help some carriers that can't afford to create and maintain a huge database of their own. "A lot of companies are favoring a clearinghouse approach where they don't have to buy several million dollars of software to let them interact with carriers," she says.
NeuStar also provides carrier access record exchange (CARE), primary interexchange carrier (PIC) and billing name and address (BNA) information. "When subscribers change long-distance carriers, information has to be exchanged between the local service provider and them so they can update account information," Marzullo says. "But if the subscriber uses a dial-around [10-10 number], they end up on somebody else's network without that information being exchanged. The IXC has to understand who the subscriber is. They have to launch a BNA search with the local provider. Carriers need a place where they can find that number easily."
The NPAC database is designed to track the exchange of numbers between CLECs and ILECs. For instance, number pooling allows carriers to get assignments of thousand blocks of numbers. The information is enabled through NPAC, or portability infrastructure, so carriers know who has certain blocks of numbers. "What the IXC won't potentially know," Marzullo says, "is a CLEC may have gotten the assignment of 571-4000 through 571-4999. That information has to be posted where the carrier can determine that."
NeuStar recently launched its LSRexpress, a local service request (LSR) clearinghouse for intercarrier LSR processing. CLECs and resellers use it to process and track all pre-order and local service activity to their ILEC trading partners.
Launching a National Repository
There is a push for a universal source code database that can be accessed by carriers. Under the auspices of ATIS, the Ordering and Billing Forum (OBF) opened discussions for creating a National Repository for Line Level Database (NRLLDB), noting difficulties in identifying entities for billing. The OBF and its subcommittees identified a major problem in the increasingly competitive world of telecom. Citing the Telecom Act and state and federal rules surrounding UNE-Ps, the OBF described the situation that by some estimates costs the industry around $2 billion a year in uncollectables due to inability to identify who owns or leases lines and other network elements.
"In addition to the 1996 changes in the wireline environment," the OBF wrote, "wireless carriers [in 2002] will be required to implement service provider portability. Unfortunately, some of the changes that have taken place have made it difficult to identify the entity providing the service to the end user, as well as identification of the entity that will provide the billing and collections function. Access or interconnection billing cannot be performed accurately or in a timely manner without this information."
The lack of information also costs carriers and providers in other ways. Carriers can't perform customer care, collect unbillables, reduce access expenses or correct errors when they pop up. Though the OBF fell short of creating that national repository, it did take technical input from carriers and providers on how to accomplish the task.
However, after working on a system based on the OBF's recommendations, Intrado went ahead and assembled its own version of the national line level database, called IntelliBase. The company launched the database in September. "There were issues with UNE-P and resale numbers, that was the reason for the creation of the NLLDB, which we inherited from ATIS," Anderson says. "We are still working on populating UNE-P and resell numbers in the database; it will be input for the next five years."
Companies such as Intrado that create and maintain databases, ironically, have to rely on the carriers themselves to give them the right information. Because carrier interconnection agreements are always changing with churning customers, changes in service offerings and an ever-fluctuating phone number and line inventory, the builders of the source databases can never be sure they have the right information. Employees at the carriers key in the UNE-P, interconnection and line information and send it via Internet, CD, tape or other medium to the keepers of such databases once a month, where it is entered into the database. If employees at the carriers fail to key in the right coding-or worse, fail to keep up the changes in their network provisioning-the databases are bound to be inaccurate. Such mistakes add to billions of dollars in lost revenue throughout the industry, Anderson says.
NECA 4 for Interconnection
NECA Tariff FCC No. 4 is the industry resource for ILECs, CLECs and wireless carriers who need to access interconnection information. The data stored there is used for ordering, billing and provisioning interstate access in the North American Numbering Plan. The database is a legal document; each month NECA files the wire center and billing percent data with the FCC. Carriers then use the database to resolve billing disputes and collect revenue.
"IXCs use the NECA Access Database to order access services from their points of presence to the central offices and assist in determining the accuracy of their access bills," says Bill Cook, director of access tariffs and planning for NECA. "For each exchange carrier, the database shows the location of their central offices, services offered (such as SONET OC-12s and ATM), as well as information on LATA. In addition, billing percents between wire centers for services provided by two or more exchange carriers are displayed to identify the relative portions of the mileage charges that are applicable."
The NECA database contains more than 24,000 central offices and 230,000 billing percent agreements. Vertical and horizontal coordinates identify each central office. The coordinates are used to determine the distance between the central offices and the interconnection points. Exchange and wireless carriers that bill by distance or share the cost of transport then know what to bill. The billing percents are multiplied by the distance to calculate each company's share of mileage when more than one carrier is involved in providing the service.
Like other database experts, Cook is keeping an eye out for changes wrought by VoIP. "We are already seeing new types of central office functions being added to the database because of VoIP," he says. "But it's not fundamental yet. As the companies implement these kinds of systems, they are reflecting these changes in Tariff 4."
Pairing phone numbers with IP codes is difficult, and the industry is looking for surefire ways to identify such transport and determine origin of the call and whom to bill for the access. Whether it will be based on duration, distance between carriers or some other methodology has yet to be seen. Cable giant Comcast is running a cable VoIP test bed in Chester County, Pa., to determine such issues.
E-911 Will Need Accurate Sourcing Data
The FCC asked telecommunications consultant Dale N. Hatfield to prepare a report on technical and operational issues in provisioning the E-911 system. Though wireless carriers are responsible for the activation and performance of the system, Hatfield concluded that it faces problems because it has to be built upon the wireline telecom infrastructure, which he considers outdated. "It is an analog technology in an overwhelmingly digital world," he writes, "yet it is a critical building block in the implementation of wireless E-911."
This affects E-911 efforts in at least two ways, he argues. First is that the routing of calls and identification of the wireless caller is paramount. Because wireline carriers aren't always accurate in determining the source of wireless calls, or can't determine which wireless carrier is terminating on its network all the time, some calls won't be routed or handled correctly.
"The ILECs essentially stand between the wireless carrier and the Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs)," Hatfield says. "As the dominant provider of wireline E-911 systems in the United States, they directly or indirectly control the selective routers, automatic location identification (ALI) databases, trunks and other facilities necessary to deliver the wireless emergency call and associated call back number and location information to the appropriate PSAP." These wireline systems depend on line identification, tariff information, identification of CLEC and wireless access calls, and LERG data to move the calls forward. "In order for Phase II information to be delivered to the PSAP, interface standards must be agreed upon, upgrades to the selective routers, ALI databases, and trunks made, facilities provisioned and tested, and tariff-based and/or contractual relationships put into place."
The second issue Hatfield raises is how the carriers and PSAPs will recover costs for upgrading the network and implementing the E-911 system. Carriers, for the most part, would recover the cost from the customer and/or state or local taxes levied on the phone bill. Hatfield believes the ILECs need the call data to support cost recovery-call data that depends on identifying wireless callers and CLECs that access the ILEC's network. Carriers could also charge wireless networks or CLECs for data dips into their LERGs or other source databases.
"The potential problem is compounded somewhat by what appears to be a wide range of techniques or plans for recovering the costs, e.g., by regular end-user tariff, interconnection tariff, special tariff, contract or some combination," the report says. Carriers involved in E-911 implementation-just about every one of them-will have to have accurate and timely source code to get an accurate view of who's interconnecting with whom and which carrier owns which line, and the distance between central offices and other equipment sites such as cell towers. If carriers can't bill for the service or track wireless access, a lot of money won't be recovered. Unanswered questions such as these will only be answered by an even greater sophistication in source databases.
Others Team To Look at Single Repository
Some in the industry believe centralizing carrier line and other equipment information in one place or tying the disparate databases together could reduce confusion.
VeriSign and a couple of telcos are looking to provide a single database for the industry. VeriSign's Rock is the co-chair of the National LIDB Product Team, made up of LIDB owners such as third parties and LECS such as Verizon, SBC, and others. "The industry wants to access the account owner, or get new data fields and have ubiquity with the codes," Rock says. "As it now stands, you have to get billing information from one place, the account information at another database.… We want to put that together," he says.
If you query a line information database today, you can determine the local service provider by the operating company number (OCN). To complicate matters, carriers often own their own LIDB, thus adding to the number of source code repositories. "VeriSign operates an LIDB, which it acquired when it bought Illuminet," he says. "The RBOCs operate an LIDB, and SNET has an LIDB, Sprint, GTE-they have an LIDB. They may not have every data element that everyone wants, but the ability to identify a carrier at the line level is there today. That's the basics."
The National LIDB Product Team, facilitated by Telcordia, meets once a month via conference call and face to face every quarter. The group finds ways to create uniform coding to make new services work, such as handling calling cards in different ILEC calling areas.
"If Verizon issues a calling card," says Arleen Elliott, director LIDB engineering and consulting for Telcordia, "you want it to work the same way in California as a call. All the LIDB owners worked together to create the national service."
An answer may not be in the creation of a single database that all carriers would access, but in an interface that links all of the databases now in use. "Perhaps the answer is to create an upfront database that goes to these databases," Rock says. "On the surface, it looks like you're going to all the databases. That's one thing we're watching."
Telcordia's Harrison isn't sure a comprehensive database is a good idea. "The attempt to get a national-level database requires to get everyone to help pay for information or codes that not all carriers need," he says. "There are already products and services available in the marketplace that meet individual company needs, are scaleable and can be integrated with a reasonable amount of effort. If you put too much data in one huge database, the chances for a major problem would multiply, along with the costs associated with trying to be all things to all users."
• Administrative Operating Company Number (AOCN): A number used to identify a third-party company that enters a LEC, CLEC, IXC or other telco’s Common Language code into industry databases. The databases track transactions among companies in the telecom industry by reading the code and determining the kind of transaction and the equipment (switches, lines, central offices) involved. Many telcos, however, prefer to input their own data into the databases via online access or by sending tape, CD or other media to the database administrator, such as Telcordia, VeriSign or NECA.
• Common Language: Coding schemes to identify network components that include locations, facilities, circuits and equipment. The system, developed by Bell Company Research, lets carriers identify items as large as a building and as small as a single board in a digital switch. For instance, the common location line indicator (CLLI) is an 11-character identifier assigned to network sites that contain telephony equipment, network switching and facility interface points. For example, with a switch labeled DLLSTXTAO3T, the first six letters indicate a Dallas, Texas location; “TA” indicates a specific central office building; “03” would be the switch number; and the final “T” would indicate a tandem switch.
• Company Codes/Operating Company Numbers (OCNs): Codes used to identify a company and track its data through various data exchange processes.
• Central Office Code (NXX) Assignment Guidelines (COCAG): Industry-developed guidelines that address assignment of central office codes (COCs), or prefixes. To provide local dialing services, telcos will usually need to obtain an NXX that is associated with each area—that is, each rate exchange area, or rate center—in which they expect to provide service.
• Centralized Message Distribution System (CMDS): A clearinghouse for the distribution of many types of electronic message interface (EMI) formatted records, including end-user billing, carrier access billing, mutual compensation, database queries, customer account information, copy records and intra-LATA alternate billing.
• Location Routing Number (LRN): A 10-digit number used in local number portability to uniquely identify a switch that has ported numbers from another switch. Carriers routing telephone calls to end users who have transferred their telephone numbers from one carrier to another perform a database query to obtain the LRN that corresponds to the dialed telephone number.
• National LIDB Product Team: Group of LIDB owners that tackle issues affecting their databases, including new technology, uniform sourcing, and other challenges. Carriers and other users can contact the group at 732-758-2594.
• NECA Tariff FCC No. 4: FCC tariff containing LEC wire center and interconnection information that supports ordering, billing and provisioning of interstate access services. The National Exchange Carrier Association serves as agent for this tariff.
• NPA/NXX Activity Guide (NNAG): Information used to prepare for all future NPA/NXX code adds, changes and disconnects. The NNAG, a Telcordia undertaking, is issued monthly via e-mail, diskette or paper form.
• NPA/NXX Active Code List (NNACL): Lists all the codes that are active as of the preceding issue date. It does not list codes that are scheduled to originate at a future date, nor planned modifications or deletions. The NNACL is issued quarterly, in January, April, July and October.
• Revenue Accounting Office (RAO): A three-character code used to process the routing of billing records, especially information that must be exchanged across different companies. RAOs are used to exchange message details between the company recording a message at the point of origination and the company billing the call to an end user.
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