Network & Billing Update

May 2005

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!

In this issue:

Editor's Note

Know Your Network

Adventures in Communication: ATS Gives the Mac Mini a Try

OffBeat News: Telecoms Think Smell May Be the Next Big Thing

Editor's Note: Thoughts on Revenue Assurance, Switch Standardization, and VoIP
By: Peter Mueller, VP of Switching Technologies, ATS

Our tenth anniversary is officially on May 19th. Ten years of “Network Integrity” in a constantly changing market may sound like an exaggeration, but it isn’t. (We’re really ten whole years old!) Speaking of exaggerations, a study in the most recent issue of Billing World showed that while average revenue leakage has gone from 13.7 percent in 2003 to 10.7 percent in 2004, North American carriers are still averaging 14.2 percent revenue leakage today. 14.2 percent revenue leakage??? I’m not even sure what “leakage” means any more, but I do know this: that number seems way too high. Don’t believe it. Think about it for a second. That’s about 1 out of every 7 calls, of every service that’s –supposedly- not getting billed. That’s like saying that on every Tuesday of every week, the average telecom carrier forgets to send out that day’s bills. Come now, Revenue Assurance Vendors – stop funding these crazy studies!
One area we’re doing a lot more work in these days is switch standardization. We got into it, of course, through our SimCall work that repeatedly showed important translation anomalies. It didn’t take long for our customers to ask if we had ways of solving the ‘root cause’ of translation errors, rather than just detecting their existence. And, while we initially took the view that better automation was needed to ‘flow through’ provisioning orders, we’re taking a slightly different path these days. SBC, Qwest and other carriers are looking for something else, and we’re working to provide it. The “something else” looks more like implementing ‘standardized’ names for translation tables and the like, which increases the ability of one translator to work on another switch. When you accomplish that, you increase ‘utilization rate’ of your technical resources, which means that – de facto – you get cleaner switches. I’ll follow up on that in another article when I get more details.
I often get asked about what ATS is doing to “get into VOIP”. It’s a curious question, because nobody ever asked me what we did to “get into” Switching, Networking or Billing. But somehow, VOIP is different – you’re expected to have a catchy answer for that one. Sure, we’re “into it”, but the question hides a more fundamental problem for the telcos: Is VOIP a “What?” -meaning a new service offering- or a “How?” – by which I mean is it a service you offer to customers or a cheaper/faster/more deployable way to deploy the service. Cablevision (a customer of ours) has done brilliantly deploying VOIP as an add-on service to their High-Speed Cable customers. They’re picking away at telco customers in a land dominated by Verizon. But that’s my point – they’re selling “voice service” using VOIP. Only those of us in the industry are obsessing about how they’re doing it. Were circuit switching equipment more fairly priced (Any idea how much Lucent lost selling 5Es on layaway plans to CLECs in the 90s? Any idea how much the survivors of that era, plus the RBOCs, pay in annual maintenance on their 5Es to compensate for Lucent’s other losses?), then – and only then – we’d get to the heart of the “VOIP vs Circuit” debate. Until then, innovative carriers like Cablevision will make a killing selling services the public wants at cut-throat prices, using cheap and efficient soft switches.

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Know Your Network

What does your network look like and how well is it working? These are big questions for any carrier, and important to anyone from network planners to CFOs. You want to make sure calls are being completed, but you also need to make sure that you are getting the most value from your network. The main problem is that building new infrastructure is expensive and timely to implement. But what if we told you that chances are your network is large enough already, and the main problem is that traffic is not routing the most efficient way.

Planning a network is complicated, we know. There are a lot of things to consider: cost of infrastructure, routing expenses, overall network design strategies, and more. Beyond that, it involves many people from within your company. Because of all this, it becomes hard to get everyone on the same page and to have everyone understand how their piece of the puzzle fits in. A network engineer is not happy if they see too many calls being dropped. A director of revenue assurance is not happy if they do not know where traffic is going to or coming from, and if they cannot bill for it successfully. A CFO is not happy when the amount of revenue coming in is not enough to support the costs going out. Everyone is concerned about something different, but at the same time everything is related. They all have to do with optimizing your network so it is using all of your resources efficiently.

In the coming months, we’ll be unveiling a new product that seeks to address these questions in detail:

Can I detect network problems before they hinder performance?
What is the cost of my current infrastructure?
Am I using it ‘optimally’ (am I under- or overusing my trunk groups)?
Would an alternative configuration be more ‘optimal’ (save money and delay the outlay of new infrastructure)?
What is the ROI of moving from my current configuration to a more efficient one?

If these things concern you (and they should), let us know and we can talk to you about setting up a free trial. Contact: Randy Guthrie at rguthrie@atso.com or (973) 696-0990, x111.

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Adventures in Communication: ATS Gives the Mac Mini a Try

Last newsletter we talked about Apple coming into the communication market with their new pint-sized Mac Minis, iChat software, and push to turn business users away from PCs. Since then, we decided to give it a try by linking up Mac Minis in our Wayne, NJ office to an international customer of ours...

After a short bit of tweaking, we were able to get everything up and running. We were all pretty excited by the high-quality audio and video that we were streaming over our current internet connection. But, as the novelty wore off, we soon realized that this would not be the most practical solution for us until we could get everyone communicating the same way. It is great that we could talk to our one customer, but the problem was we could not even talk to someone down the hall. Since iChat relies on the fact that the person you are trying to communicate with is also running iChat, it’s great for point-to-point communication but it won’t be replacing our telephone lines anytime soon.

These Peer-to-peer (P2P) and other free internet communications services are definitely making headway. What started as simple text messaging like AOL's Instant Messenger and Microsoft's Windows Messenger, are now robust tools that include voice, video, and conferencing. Specifically, the popularity of the free internet phone service Skype is making telecom's take notice. Everyone is nervous that these free P2P internet communications services are going to take away market share. But what we have learned from our test drive with the Mac Mini and iChat, is that even the simplest and most acclaimed services still have too many limitations to completely replace standard telephone networks.

When we think about why wireless phone service have been so successful, we get a picture of why P2P still has a ways to go. In order for a new communications tool to be successful, it needs to be easy to use and it has to make communication simpler. While P2P may be cheap (or free), it still requires a lot of technical knowledge for your average phone customer, and is also limiting in who you can talk to and where you can talk from. Perhaps if everyone you knew carried around an Apple laptop and was always connected to a wireless network, iChat would be your primary form of telephone service. But we all know that this will never be the case (despite what Steve Jobs’ may want). For businesses, it is hard enough to integrate a single communications system throughout the company, let alone trying to get everyone else you do business with you to do the same.

While our new Mac Mini won’t be replacing regular phone service for us, it does serve as a great point-to-point communication device and an excellent way to connect with current customers. Perhaps keeping a few key customers happy is enough to justify it in the first place.

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OffBeat News: Telecoms Think Smell May Be the Next Big Thing

TOKYO — You can play games, shop and find love on the Internet. So why not sniff your favorite fragrance as well? A new service being tested by NTT Communications Corp., Japan’s top telecommunications company, sends data that trigger the release of one of 36 scents — blends of natural oils, such as eucalyptus, sandalwood and basil.

A test version functions as a horoscope reading. Punch your birthday into the computer, and different data for the scents are relayed over the Net to an attached device that resembles a crystal ball with a straw-like nozzle. The “good luck” mixture changes, depending on your sign. Cancerians get a waft of chamomile, lavender and vetiver oils, which according to a Japanese horoscope expert is a perk-up odor. Pisces get lavender, clary sage and lemongrass.

The machines and software were developed by Mirapro Co., a machinery parts and computer chip company. Prices are still undecided, and overseas sales are not yet planned, company officials said.

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