the IP world, which is based on an always-on broadband network, service providers realize that you can’t differentiate between prepaid and postpaid, as you could in the old days.”
Coastal Technologies Group (www. ctgi.biz) provides Call Management Operational Support System solutions specifically for the telecom industry, ranging from order entry to network monitoring to bill auditing. Their solutions suite comprises integrated products that address automation for the service order process and the tracking of all aspects of a switched network’s performance.
Interestingly, Coastal currently processes billions transactions per month as an ASP (Application Service Provider).
Jay Bowker, Coastal’s VP of Global Sales and Marketing, says: “We specialize in doing interconnect billing, fraud, and phantom traffic detection for carriers. We process about 11 billion CDRs for Qwest every month. Approximately one billion of those call detail records consists of Sonus-based VoIP calls. What we do with those billion calls is as follows: Each of those records has a separate identifier, so we can tell if the call was terminated on, say, a Nortel switch somewhere in the Qwest network but originating on a Sonus GSX 9000 VoIP mediation switch. Each Sonus switch has certain fields within the CDR that are obviously what you’d get off of a typical Class 5 switch, such as IP addresses, quality of service, other specific IP parameters.”
“One novel thing we do is to store all of our data records online for six months and then we archive them on tape,” says Bowker. “We provide a service to our carriers such that they can do full, network-wide searches, audits, trends analysis and data mining on all their data records, whether they be from a Class 5 or a VoIP switch. We can store about 12 terabytes of data online for them.”
Analytics is also the watchword over at Aperio CI ( www.aperioci.com), which provides data-driven customer retention and acquisition solutions for both VoIP and traditional service providers. (Aperio’s CEO, William Mich,
recently spoke at VON Europe regarding the immaturity of many VoIP provider systems.)
Aperio’s President, Paul King, says “We’ve been doing a lot of data analytics for these companies over several years. We’ve been involved in a lot of analysis on how people use the services and products and how operators can provide better information to their customers and make better, more tailored offers to their customers. It’s all basically about how we can help CSPs through analytics so they can make more personalized offers to customers, and to help them retain and acquire new customers in a more operationally efficient fashion.”
“We recently worked with a provider of VoIP and video services,” says King. “They’re a cable company with about a million customers in the telephone space. This company offers triple-play type products, which are all over the place now in North America. Our analysis asked if the VoIP provider’s free 411 service was a profit drain. Answer: Yes. Because it was free, callers generated about six to seven 411 calls per month, which is more than three times as many 411 calls as they would make with a traditional provider.”
Major billing vendors include Con-vergys ( www.convergys.com) and Amdocs ( wwa.amdocs.com). At Amdocs, Reed Majors, Director of IPTV, says: “For many of our customers VoIP is not a standalone offering, but instead represents one of several new technologies and revenue generating opportunities that leverage a next generation IP Network. As such, Amdocs can support not only billing needs, but also the end-to-end service ordering to support requirements for IP convergence and specifically VoIP.”
“We have a convergent platform available that combines rating with Diameter-ready real-time processing [Diameter is the successor to RADIUS] that enables our customers to launch innovative IMS services and bundles to their subscribers,” says Majors. “This is key to enabling service providers to integrate their VoIP services with other IP based services and bundles. With Amdocs Mediation, our customers can
rapidly adapt to changes in network architecture brought upon by fixed-mobile convergence strategies and next-generation-network rollouts including support for hybrid networks.”
“Service providers need to deploy, bill and support services that go beyond their historic models,” says Majors. “For example, pricing models for VoIP and converged offerings differ from the traditional ‘bill for minutes’ model. Not only will time-based billing either go away or be applied in a different way, but new features and transactions will need to be addressed. This includes things like ‘follow me’ functionality that are net-work-driven but will need to be billed to the customer. Another example of a converged offer would be placing an IP call over the IPTV ‘experience’ into the home. Is this an IPTV service? A VoIP service? What if the call was initiated by pointing and clicking on an ad on the TV?”
“The complexity starts to become mind boggling and no longer is it about spitting out a charge on a bill for a one dollar 411 inquiry but an understanding of what that transaction is, and how it fits into the overall suite of IP services to which the customer has chosen to subscribe,” says Majors.
The essence of a billing technology platform, if sufficiently generalized, can be used for things other than straightforward billing of customers for usage. Take for example billing from the perspective of the enterprise. Few companies are able to track their considerable communications expenses, since the effort required to tie literally mountains of paper to individuals or departments is too great. However, CTI Group (www.ctigroup. com) makes some interesting products such as SmartBill Connect, an online invoice and transaction analysis system.
Sid Rao, Chief Technologist at CTI Group, says: “We take a much wider, abstract view of the billing process. SmartBill Connect, for example, is a web-based invoice management solution for service providers and enterprises enabling interactive invoice management, analysis and reporting, thus giving enterprise customers the
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