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Intercarrier Compensation: Confusion Abounds
By Susana Schwartz
The comment period for the so-called Missoula Plan is creating a lot of dialogue about comprehensive intercarrier compensation reform. The FCC’s request for comment is making a lot of people thing about how a uniform industry process could come about for creating and exchanging CDRs in a standardized way.
Rural and smaller carriers hope that the Missoula Plan will bring about a unification of interstate and intrastate access rates, thus removing the incentive for access rate arbitrage.
“The long-term perspective of how Missoula is laid out would simplify the business processes for terminating and originating rates for tracks one, two and three,” says Ron Angner, principal and VP of TMNG global, referring to the designations under Missoula for small, medium and large carriers.
However, critics claim unification in intercarrier compensation is not fostered by the tracks, which put caps on terminating and originating access charges, as well as on subscriber line charges. And some, like Comptel in its recent comments, say the classification favors ILECs. They also point out that CLECs are relegated to track one, regardless of size or area of operation.
It seems the fairness of the rate tables will be the biggest challenge for the Missoula Plan. “Every player in the chain will think its services are worth more than others,” Angner says, “so you have to have everyone charging the same if you are truly to level the playing field. If all 2,000-plus telcos under the Missoula plan have to adhere to common transport charges and rates of return, then there is a chance to resolve some issues.”
How significant would the changes be to existing CABS or OSS/BSS, if reconciliation and settlement changed under Missoula?
“I don’t see how reconfiguring and changing prices and settlement elements would be too arduous for carriers, as they won’t have to throw out their existing systems or software,” Angner says, noting that the plan would involve configuration changes more than software design changes. “That means, for example, a billing system set up with tables will require someone to go in, through a Web interface or other interface, to enter data about rates so that the next time the system is activated the rating system points to the elements in the table that must be used.
“You can make changes like that every day without much problem. From a technical and administrative perspective, there’s no reason to oppose this, as no hard-coding would be necessary.
“The problem comes from the fact that those in each track will accuse the other tracks of having an advantage in rate changes, which is why equalizing so revenues are fairly applied will depend on the financial issues each track presents to the FCC.”
According to Ed Shanahan, Partner at Excelerate Partners, this is not a billing record problem but a possible switch problem, where data does not travel through networks as it should, and a definite contract problem.
Agreeing is Intec’s Gerry Guidry, product director for U.S. wholesale billing products. “This really is an issue of contracts and enforcement,” he says. “As an industry, we have had record exchange for a long time. This is about trust and contracts with tandem providers, who have a bit of risk, it seems. Mechanically, I don’t see this as an issue, but somehow the recordings from third parties and tandem companies are making record exchange a problem.”
Perhaps for carriers the solution lies in tweaking settlement systems and mediation systems responsible for looking up data. “The goal is to find who owns the trunk group from which the data came into your network,” says Shanahan. “That isn’t a huge issue—it shouldn’t be.”
Switch tables and logic in switches should be enough when call records are generated in switches. If carriers cannot determine pricing and settlement, mediation should be able to pick up additional data from cross-reference tables.
“If anything,” Shanahan suggests, “perhaps new validation tools are needed to help when transit carriers have more exposure and are held responsible by rural telcos who cannot tell who the originating carrier is. As it is now, you need to be able to isolate trunk groups and do upstream detective work.”
On the network side, carriers in the meantime have to make sure that tables are populated correctly. They need to ensure that switch tables populating the records for billing and other systems are correctly utilized so that trunk groups can be tied to carrier partners.
Today’s system of rates involves thousands of table entries, but that complexity could be mitigated if the Missoula Plan simplifies it into less granular rate sets.
It could potentially allow carriers to clean up their systems with simpler rating tables and logic that really should not be rocket science.
“This should not be so complex to do—and if it is, then flat rates are necessary, so that terms aren’t confused when describing the transmission of information from originating carriers to terminating offices,” says Shanahan. “When carriers exchange message interfaces, the long-distance carrier needs to pass to the local company a shortened version of the message called the exchange message interface.
“But when that hits the originating switch and the intermediary switches, it seems only the information on the originating switch is viewable. With SS7 and the feature groups involved, there is either arbitrage or some loss of information through the circuit switches that no one can seem to resolve.”
Indeed, it should not be so hard to pass data, because the terminating carrier should be able to identify the trunk group from whence it came, or the subsets of trunk groups dedicated to upstream carriers. “The guy in the middle should know where they got the call from—they identify the carrier with which they link as the problem,” explains Shanahan.
If rural carriers get traffic from a transit carrier sitting in the middle of the chain of interconnected companies, the rural carriers no longer want to eat the cost if the originator is not known. “In a softswitch environment, the VoIP and cable companies are not dealing with traditional circuit switch infrastructure, so what is limiting them from capturing the traffic from the next company in the sequence?” Shanahan asks.
Either the networks cannot carry the information for some technical reason, or the carriers are not using the tables already available to them.
For those reasons, many think Missoula should equalize inter-LATA and intra-LATA rates so there is no incentive for arbitrage, and plenty of incentive to get tables and signaling up and running in an optimal manner.
“The only solution for phantom traffic is to have people thinking in a fraud-related mindset,” says Shanahan.
He believes the net neutrality issue will highlight the phantom traffic issue. “If you get to the point where anything sent over the network—whether intra- or interstate—is an information service, then arguments about net neutrality will come into play here as well.”
“Also, there is the consideration of unintended consequences inherent with any change,” he says. “There inevitably are reciprocal compensation problems that will not be expected with any change, so we have to all carefully consider what doors open for abuse with any change.”
Will Syndesis Bring ‘Live’ Inventory To Market?
With its Adaptive Resource Manager (ARM), Syndesis claims to have the first “live” or real-time inventory management solution out there—but is it marketing hype to court acquisition suitors, or is it real evidence of momentum in the right direction?
“Syndesis has started at the conceptual/diagrammatical bottom with the discovery platform, which provides native data about what’s in the network, and then it has built planning tools and management applications on top of that,” explains Jeffrey Cotrupe, founder and CEO of MarketPOWER, LLC.
ARM definitely leverages the CoManage assets in an attempt to make discovery the key of the new offering. “CoManage was one of the few companies whose core business plan was built around auto-discovery, and it was one of the few to actually survive to become a force in the market,” Cotrupe says.
It is auto-discovery that may help carriers evolve from “off-line” inventory management solutions that lack native connections to actual network resources—thus far a hindrance to flow-through provisioning for next-gen services.
Where systems required manual updates of logical details, ARM’s real-time inventory management may recognize live assets for VoIP or IPTV, thus enabling carriers to track variables such as IP numbers during the life cycle of a service.
Through continuous “discovery sweeps,” ARM attempts to go beyond just discovering physical elements, as it attempts to isolate and reconcile discrepancies as well.
Live and adaptive inventory is what ARM hopes to establish, so that carriers can match capacity to demand by optimizing the tracking and utilization of physical and logical resources for both connectivity and applications. Then carriers can adapt their networks and service infrastructures based on demand patterns visible in networks and customer segments.
“Traditionally, inventory and resource management focus solely on the logical capacity over which new services are provisioned,” says Cotrupe. “Provisioning for on-demand services like IPTV will require intimate knowledge of not only equipment, but the types of tiering and capabilities that differentiate one service from another.”
This approach means treating logical components of the network as assets, just as you treat physical components as assets today.
“That is the heavy lifting that was missing in network-centric views of inventory,” contends Mark Fowley, executive VP for sales and marketing at Syndesis. “Once actual services had to be layered into networks on a subscriber-by-subscriber or business-by-business basis, the problems began.”
Because changes to equipment configuration did not always make their way into inventory systems, the systems of record were often inaccurate. Fowley maintains that that as much as 50 to 70 percent of inventory information is inaccurate because changes are forced through off-line databases. “Trouble tickets and engineering changes do not get to off-line databases fast enough, which creates fallout when services are provisioned and activated,” Fowley explains. “You have to understand the physical connectivity of routers and equipment, but also how services are layered on top.”
ARM tackles this problem by making the network itself the system of record, using discovery capabilities to understand elements, such as slots and shelves, as well as logical configuration of layers two and three (such as VPN circuits and their configuration).
BPL Controversy Continues
In November the FCC ruled that Internet access enabled by broadband over power line technology is an information service, placing such services on an equal footing with cable and DSL Internet services.
Since that decision, there has been a firestorm of controversy. Computer Weekly recently explored the BPL interference debate, interviewing industry executives, radio hobbyists and government agencies.
First Communications, one of the largest CLECs in the Midwest, and Current Communications are examples of companies that offer BPL to residential and business customers by enabling high-speed connectivity via a building’s existing power lines. Throughput can reach speeds up to 20 Mbps.
In response, a long list of companies and government agencies such as FEMA have complained of potential interference hazards. BellSouth’s CTO, for one, urged the IEEE to avoid “leaving policy to lawyers” and to seek rules keeping the technology from interfering with DSL. AT&T has also been outspoken about the BPL threat, but it has recently backed off from safety issues it saw in attaching equipment for the service to utility poles. There are still jurisdictional issues for states like Texas that haven’t adopted pole attachment rules.
The United Power Line Council claims there’s nothing to worry about, though some say early data seems to indicate evidence to the contrary. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration is currently conducting its own study to be released this year.
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