U.S. Carriers Lose Revenue on International Wireless Termination
John L. Guerra
04/01/2002
The industry faces an international mystery. Did my customer’s phone call from the United States to a foreign country terminate on a wireless network? It seems a simple question in this age of enlightened telecommunications technology. But it’s far from simple, and far from trivial.
“Large carriers estimate they are losing $1 billion a year, collectively,” says Kelly Anderson, a senior project manager at Intrado, which performs telecommunications data management and network transactions.
In the United States, wireless carriers don’t charge wireline carriers a per-minute charge for carrying their calls, so U.S. wireless carriers don’t have CAB (carrier access billing) systems. Wireless carriers in other countries don’t charge their customers for incoming calls; they instead charge the originating carrier a per-minute fee for termination. The originating carrier needs to know the number called so it can determine whether it’s wireline or wireless.
When the bill comes in to U.S. carriers from around the world, they need to know whether their wireless interconnect charges are correct. But how does a carrier sift through that ocean of call detail, determine the routing of the millions of calls over international trunks, through country gateways and across multiple national networks, and pinpoint the cellular number of the end user in someplace like New Delhi?
Well, they often can’t. “How in the world is AT&T going to know the digit string associated with every wireless number in Australia?” asks Alan Healey, vice president of Intec Telecom Systems.
Multiple Handoffs Complicate Tracking
International carrier agreements are wireless-sensitive. Carriers often agree on a volume-specific mix of wireline and wireless termination. Once wireless calls hit a certain proportion, the charges can increase. “I’m AT&T wireline in the U.S. and I’m sending traffic to Australia; my partner is Telstra,” Healey says. “Typically in my operating agreement we will define a settlement rate at so many cents per minute, including rates for business time, holidays, weekends, etc. The agreement might say this is applicable if the total wireless terminating traffic is not greater than 20 percent of my total traffic. If it exceeds that, there will be a surcharge.”
When Telstra’s landline network hands the call off to an independent wireless carrier within Australia, the wireless carrier sees only a call from Telstra, not AT&T. AT&T, meanwhile, can’t see the wireless carrier. So Telstra has to bill AT&T for what the Australian wireless carrier charges it. If AT&T wants to be sure Telstra’s bill is correct, the U.S. carrier has to figure out some way of independently verifying how many of its calls going through Telstra were wireless terminations.
“It’s a great concern,” Healey says. “It will clearly grow as an issue, because globally the number of wireless lines is about to pop above the number of wireline lines.”
Digit String Works in Some Countries
Many countries designate particular digits to help carriers identify wireless phone numbers. “There is a dialing string in most countries,” says Dale Eaton, director of market strategy and research for SchlumbergerSema. “In the U.S., it’s the central office number within an area code. If I’m in France and dial the country code, … 6 is reserved for wireless.” That means U.S. carriers need to have access to a robust and accurate database of working wireless numbers in more than 100 other countries. AT&T and other big carriers might have the personnel and money to create their own databases of international wireless lines to verify termination fees, but smaller carriers have to trust the terminating network owner to bill them correctly—until a problem with the bill is obvious.
Even countries with designated wireless dialing strings pose problems. As in the United States, the number pool changes as carriers are assigned new number batches and customers switch carriers. “In some countries, wireless carrier numbers can be reassigned to wireline numbers,” Healey says.
“If a carrier has its own database and feels secure that it knows all the wireless numbers in the world, they don’t,” says Jackie Halpern, associate director at Southern New England Telephone Diversified Group. “Five thousand more numbers can open up around the world tomorrow for wireless, and they won’t catch that change.”
How to Build a Database
Halpern and her staff at SNET are building a database for smaller carriers that don’t have resources to pinpoint wireless termination. The idea for the database came about when SNET’s international partner requested a routing guide to sort out wireline and wireless traffic. “When they came to this company for resolution,” she says, “they were being billed by their interconnect carriers for wireless termination at 10 times the rate of wireline, and they didn’t have accurate information to bill their end users.”
SNET tried to use advanced intelligent network (AIN) messages to determine where international calls were going. “We wanted to have carrier switches launch AIN queries into our databases, receive routing information and act on them,” she says. “The international switches could not send AIN queries, couldn’t let me know the least-cost routing based on the carrier-specific data.”
Yet Halpern says the AIN methodology could become operational once switch vendors build that capability into their switches. “We’ve got the AIN databases,” she says, “and we’re ready to roll that way.”
Comparing CDRs to Wireless Numbers
Halpern and her colleagues decided to build a database that would compare the phone numbers on the CDRs with a list of more than 100,000 entries in 206 different countries. The task was daunting, Halpern says, because they had to gather the information from myriad sources, including such foreign regulatory bodies as Italy’s Autorita Per Le Garanzie Nelle Comunicazioni and Luxembourg’s Institut Luxembourgeois De Regulation. Some of the numbering information could be found on various Web sites, but staff also sought data from the International Telecommunication Union, regional and city governments, foreign carriers and other sources. They even traveled to foreign capitals in search of the information when it could not otherwise be obtained. And then there was the language barrier.
“No small carrier can devote this kind of time. We’ve been working on it for two years,” Halpern says.
The calling information is loaded onto the database. “Each one of the entries includes the country, city, and country wireless codes,” she says. “If the [carriers] send in a phone number, it will go to the closest match—not to the end-user level, but the lowest level we’ve loaded. It will say ‘France, wireless.’ Every one of the entries will have an indicator of either wireline or wireless. Countries assign codes to indicate certain cities. When the number hits our database, for instance, the carrier will get a response saying it’s Balchek, Bulgaria, and it’s a wireless termination.”
SNET hopes to launch the database by May. Intec has a way to ping databases in foreign countries to determine wireless termination, something that larger carriers may be doing, Healey says. “One of the capabilities that we have is a link to an external database that’s CORBA-managed, so we can get updated data. When I get their bill and [deal with] foreign terminating wireless calls, I have to be able to determine that the [called] number is a wireless number” he says. “I need to have access to an Australia database that holds wireless phone numbers. I do an affirmative database dip. You take a download of it once, so you have an image of it; you have a CORBA link that updates the database.”
The process can be lengthy with some countries. “If you want an independent accurate view of that information, there’s a difficulty in finding a single database,” he says. “You have to go to every single operator in the country. Most operators don’t do this because of the difficulty of managing all of the sources. It’s simply [an issue of] cost and access to the data.”
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