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Rate Area Mismatch Report By: Lee Helwig, Software Engineer, ATS Overview: A rate area mismatch, also known as a mis-assigned line, is an access line physically located within a certain exchange, but with a NXX assigned to another exchange. This problem leads to customers not being charged for toll calls when they should and vice versa. Therefore, a communications provider might unknowingly be extending a caller's local calling area. ATS has recently completed a mis-assigned lines case study involving a large ILEC. The study will be of immediate interest to any communications provider looking at their internal network to generate revenue and reduce cost. Mis-assigned lines can become a major problem among local exchange carriers. Thousands of lines are misallocated every year and the cost of these anomalies can reach into the millions. How to use SimCall to Check for Mis-Assigned Lines: Upon the receipt of an office image for SimCall purposes, the data includes line side information that can be further utilized by the Marketing department of any specific RBOC. When a customer first comes to a phone company for line assignment, they are assigned to a lineattr, in the Nortel DMS, or a screener, in a Lucent 5ES, that depicts the calling restrictions they requested and the rate area from which they will be originating their calls. Due to customer churn, PUC regulation changes, rate area boundary changes, new nnx's being introduced to previously established NPA's, new NPA's, NPA splits, and NPA overlays the new customer assignment software must be constantly updated to accommodate the new changes. Due to lag time between the new code assignment software updates and the churn, a need was realized due to the fact that new customers had to be assigned and the new options might not yet be available, the customers could possibly be mis-assigned to the wrong option. When a customer is mis-assigned they could conceivably be charged for a Toll call when calling across the street and have a call rated local when calling 30 miles away. This would obviously cause billing errors and customer complaints. When a new switch image is received, each line is examined as to the associated rate area and then bashed with either LERG information, or RBOC specific npanxx data. A secondary text report is then generated depicting the mismatches. In the larger RBOC's the data is separated into two different reports, the first going the the CENTREX group and the second designed to go the Marketing group who is responsible for the POTS lines. These reports are then automatically emailed to recipients of a predetermined list. With these reports, we have enabled the correction of hundreds of thousands of lines across the Country thus enabling RBOC's another tool to help them with customer satisfaction. Questions or Comments? Contact us at info@atso.com.
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