Network & Billing Update

The ATS Network & Billing Update is published by Advanced Technologies & Services, Inc. (www.atso.com), a revenue and service assurance solutions provider. This free newsletter is a guide to telecommunications OSS, billing, and revenue assurance news and other telecom industry analysis. To unsubscribe, contribute an article, or for offbeat news, please scroll to the end. Feel free to forward this newsletter!

Editor's Note: Repaving highways and why Intercarrier Compensation isn’t going away.
By: Peter Mueller, VP of Switching Technologies, ATS

It’s no surprise that only governments build highways… they’re for the public good, anyway, and there’s little economic incentive for anyone else to bother even trying. We grin and bear it when the government takes our taxes and sometimes even our tolls to pay for maintenance. When stuck in traffic, we stare wishfully at the opposing lanes sailing along unimpeded. At the end of the day, though, pretty much all the cars that went east in the morning come home west in the afternoon.

What does this have to do with Telecom? Well, pretty much nothing, it turns out. Telecom “lanes” don’t share traffic equally and traffic never flows in equal patterns, even over extended periods. So, it’s no surprise, then, that our industry’s myriad ways of settling these discrepancies can’t be squeezed out of our procedures. FCC Chairman Martin gave a wakeup call this past week to all those “Bill and Keep” roadies who think that –somehow- our networks are getting so simple and cheap, nobody needs to really watch the traffic anymore. According to NECA's Washington Watch newsletter...

Chairman Martin said he supports a “rational and unified” approach to Intercarrier Compensation that would reduce arbitrage, create efficiencies, and encourage investment. Martin called a single unitary rate “a step in the right direction,” but said that a rate of zero or bill-and-keep was “not politically viable” because it would create undesirable increases in end user rates. Martin praised and encouraged the work of the NARUC Intercarrier Compensation Task Force, which has been working on an industry solution for several months. He also called for the creation of a methodology to lessen the impact of intercarrier compensation reform on rural states and rural areas, and mentioned the possibility of a “glide path” or alternate regulation that would avoid a flash cut.

The first time you sent an e-mail you probably, like me, marveled that so many computers were bouncing your writing to the far corners of the world … all for free. All you had to pay for was the ‘entrance ramp’ to the superhighway, by way of your local ISP. Here again, the interceding computers, routers and so forth, were paid for by enterprising companies who didn’t see directionality as a factor in their business plans. I think that’s going to change – and, indeed it should – as the smartest companies around realize that opportunity lies in serving customers that, for whatever reason, have tailored needs that bely the “50% in, 50% out” rules that governed so much of yesteryear’s capital investing and engineering guidelines.

This wouldn’t be anything new, of course. The CLECs figured this out with reciprocal compensation and ISPs ---realizing that ISPs inevitably terminate more calls than they generate. This was a nice boondoggle, while termination rates were held artificially high via regulation. (Of course, it was the RBOCs who wanted these termination fees in the first place when they – wrongly – assumed CLECs would find only net outbound callers as customers.)

If I were to hazard a guess, I would guess that the Net is next. Can the billions of dollars already invested in everything from dark/lit fiber to routers, to gateways and everything in between continue to ignore directionality of traffic? Can data carriers remain profitable without assigning cost to those who incur it? And, lastly, who’s going to figure out the next competitive advantage by pursuing precisely those markets (like yesterday’s ISP) with unique traffic needs?

I’m not proposing more regulation ---quite the contrary. I’m proposing that blindly assuming tomorrow’s business and consumer users will flow traffic in 50/50 fashion will lead to inefficient capital spending by the big guys, and tremendous opportunity for the little guys who see it differently. That’s also why all end-users eventually experience “usage-based pricing”, and why interconnected service providers – similarly – can’t, ultimately, settle for bill and keep scenarios.

Here’s a final thought experiment: Take away VOIP’s current regulatory advantage (not having to collect taxes, no universal service fees, preferred TDM termination arrangements) and watch how fast “unlimited calling” packages get taken off the shelf.

If you’re interested in how “directional” your traffic is, we can help you quantify it down to the individual-customer level. You might be surprised to see how (un)profitable certain segments of your business actually are. Give us a call.

SAN ANTONIO & WAYNE, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 31, 2005--SBC Knowledge Ventures, a subsidiary of SBC Communications Inc. (NYSE:SBC - News), and Advanced Technologies & Services Inc. (ATS) today announced an agreement in which ATS is being granted marketing rights for patented Trunk Optimization software technology developed by SBC companies. Trunk Optimization software provides telecommunications network planners and operations personnel with a comprehensive view of their entire network in order to plan, optimize and manage its infrastructure.

As of publication time, the entire press release could be seen here.

Sandvine said the surge in VoIP providers is beginning to strain many ISPs and it urged ISPs to structure their networks to make sure high quality service is delivered to end subscribers.

"ISPs can enhance the broadband experience by prioritizing or reserving bandwidth for latency-sensitive and interactive applications like VoIP," said Sandvine's managing director Chris Colman in a statement Wednesday. "For ISPs planning to bring their own VoIP services to market, it is imperative they understand how many minutes are already being consumed by subscribers."

Sandvine noted that the voice component of VoIP traffic should have rigorous and flexible techniques in order to deliver high quality of experience (QoE) service.

The firm, a provider of network gear and services to broadband companies, stated in its report: "The battle for market share amongst all these offerings will be fought on the field of QoE, a measure of end-to-end performance that combines reliability, standard quality of service metrics, and subjective end-user experiences."

Normally, we use this space for something a little offbeat and funny relating to our industry. This month, instead, we want to publicize a new practice we've been hearing about following the London attacks earlier this summer: Think of it as "Your cell phone meets your medical bracelet". A number of companies, including Qwest, are promoting the practice of entering a universal "Call in case of emergency" number in your cell phone using the ICE acronym.

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