NECA

ATS Network & Billing Update

March 2003

Challenged by Wireless Reciprocal Compensation Issues?

NECA Services New Program Can Help.

For many telecommunications providers, reciprocal compensation, the charges on provider can collect for terminating the local traffic of another provider, can account for up to 30% or more of total revenues. This is a huge piece of your business, but billing for and collecting reciprocal compensation is a unique and complex process, which can result in disputes and a loss of revenues. In fact “CMRS providers are very comfortable terminating traffic to you without paying you”.

NECA Services Revenue Assurance Products can help you with those disputes and collect lost revenues from wireless providers without expensive equipment purchases or software license fees. We collect your AMA or EMI data from your mediation system and process it using powerful, proprietary software. We provide you with electronic reports that give you the ability to “drill down” to any underlying data element, including individual call records, to validate accuracy.

Two of the revenue assurance management reports that we produce, which ECs have found helpful in their efforts to bill and collect reciprocal compensation, include:

Originating Reciprocal Compensation Report By Originating End Office – This report provides the users with summaries of calls and associated minutes of use, by day and time period within day (day, evening, night/weekend), by originating end office and rate center that terminate to specific connecting carriers by terminating end office switch and rate center. Further details by trunk group number carrying the traffic as well as call type code are also available in the report.

Terminating Reciprocal Compensation Report By Terminating End Office – This report provides the users with summaries of calls and associated minutes of use, by day and time period within day (day, evening, night/weekend), by terminating end office and rate center that originate from specific carriers by originating end office switch and rate center. Further details by trunk group number carrying the traffic as well as call type code are also available in the report.

The combination of these reports provides you with all the information you will need to identify reciprocal compensation type calls originating and terminating within your network and put you on your way to resolving billing disputes.

The OPASTCO Roundtable in “Terminating Wireless Traffic, How Can I Get Paid?” January/February 2003, identified five steps to assist exchange carriers in getting compensated. Among the steps they include #3: “Identify an adequate record source for measuring and billing CMRS terminating traffic.” NECA Services can be your source for analyzing AMA and EMI data to help you pursue compensation. Consider the words of one of NECA Services recent clients:

"Just one report helped us identify a loss of over 20% of our terminating minutes of use on a common trunk group. We now have documentation identifying the originator of the call, the Feature Group type, and the trunk group.

"As a small, independent telephone company, we don't have the resources to resolve this kind of problem. The Revenue Assurance products from NECA Services provided the documentation we need to collect our reciprocal compensation."

- Todd Irish -- President, La Harpe Telephone Company

Call 888.221.6322 ext. 8482 to get more information on NECA Service’s Revenue Assurance Products or e-mail them at RA@necaservices.com

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SimCall™: Revenue & Service Assurance at the Switch™ ROI Estimator

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