The bottom line of $$7

The marketing, operations, billing and other departments within a carrier organization can use SS7 surveillance technology to help turn data into dollars

Whether you are a wireline or wireless carrier, established player or start-up, your network can contribute to your bottom line in ways beyond call handling. With the right tools, you can unlock information from your SS7 network to generate additional revenue, free up much-needed cash and retain customers. In today's deregulated, competitive environment, this is often the difference between growth and stagnation or between success and failure.

As competition and customer expectations soar, so does a carrier's requirement to make the best possible use of its resources. One of the best but most underused resources available to any carrier is its network. Not only does the network track a customer's every call, it also informs the carrier about how well and efficiently it is meeting customers' needs - and opens windows into competitors' activities.

SS7 surveillance is the mechanism that can turn this data into dollars. Though they won't be competing for center stage with the newest converged network technologies, these workhorse systems have proved to be invaluable business tools for many carriers. In fact, the uses are so varied and vital that such systems often pay for themselves within their first year of operation. Typical applications include streamlining troubleshooting efforts, generating revenue from intercarrier billing arrangements, reducing fraud and improving quality of service (QOS).

Seemingly endle$$ options

When searching for an appropriate system, carriers have several options. To maintain control over direction and make sure competitors don't have access to the same features, some of the larger carriers have developed their own systems.

Alternatively, carriers are turning to embedded network-based solutions. These have the weight of large vendors behind them and offer a single source for network and surveillance. Installation, operation and maintenance also can be simplified because they are just another part of the overall existing network. However, this option may pose some limitations. As the network becomes heavily loaded, lower-priority surveillance functions may begin to shut down in an effort to handle the traffic. The traffic priority levels are maintained, but surveillance data and services may not be available when they are most needed. In addition, network-based solutions tend to function best in single vendor network environments where integration with other vendors' elements isn't an issue.

Another increasingly popular option is to purchase a surveillance system from a third-party vendor. Although these suppliers don't have the size or weight of network vendors, they tend to be highly focused on surveillance and related products. Third-party systems also do not suffer from the drawbacks of embedded solutions and are suitable for multivendor networks, which is becoming increasingly important as carriers begin to plan and implement converged voice and data networks. In short, if a converged network is in your future, make sure your surveillance system can handle the job.

Contemporary systems follow a distributed client/server architectural model, with signaling probes passively monitoring switches, signal transfer points or other links, to collect messages, errors, alarms and activity statistics from the network. A carrier does not need to own its own SS7 capability to make use of an SS7 surveillance system, as shown in Figure 1. One or more back-end servers collect the information from the probes over a LAN or WAN. Marketing, operations, billing and other groups then make use of various client applications and reports to make sense of the data and gain a competitive edge. Figure 2 depicts a typical architectural model of a contemporary surveillance system.

$$7 surveillance in practice

Intercarrier billing, also known as reciprocal compensation, is a prime example of an area where a surveillance system can pick up substantial revenue that many carriers currently leave on the table. Dedicated billing systems do a fine job of generating a monthly revenue stream from subscribers. However, their capabilities in other areas generally are less developed. In practice, it is often difficult or impossible for traditional primary billing systems to regularly generate this sort of information.

In the monopolistic environment before deregulation, operators carried transiting and terminating traffic for each other - essentially at no charge. Without competition, there was no need to worry about who actually terminated more calls for whom, even though terminated calls generated no revenue. Carriers called it an even split and didn't worry about the details.

However, in today's deregulated environment, the proliferation of competing carriers and interconnected networks has forced an end to such "gentlemanly" practices. With the advent of competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) and wireless operators, the industry needed a default intercarrier billing template. The FCC obliged with a baseline traffic model for use between incumbent and competitive or wireless carriers in the absence of interconnection billing agreements.

The model assumes a specific percentage of intercarrier traffic flowing in each direction. Based on historical patterns, the current model stipulates that 83% of traffic terminates with the incumbent, and 17% terminates at the CLEC or wireless operator. A carrier receives revenue for each terminated call, so it's in every carrier's best interest to prove that it terminates more than the default. Particularly with the explosive growth of dial-up Internet calls to ISPs, competitive carriers often know that they are terminating far more than 17%, but they have difficulty proving it. An incumbent must be able to confirm the actual data to keep the competition honest.

A surveillance system with a dedicated reciprocal billing application can collect and report the call detail records and the summary statistics and reports required to understand and prove exact mixes of intercarrier traffic on a carrier-by-carrier basis. Armed with this data, the carrier can negotiate improved terms with interconnected carriers, thereby immediately increasing revenue. By filtering out all extraneous information at the hardware probe level, the task becomes quite efficient. A properly sized system will store information on every relevant call and will not drop records as network load peaks.

One well-known carrier has used an SS7 surveillance application to save $1 million per month, which goes straight to the bottom line. The system paid for itself several times within the first year of operation. Table 1 shows the business case for this system. Other billing-related surveillance system uses include verifying the call detail records generated by the network for use by the primary billing system, and billing for subscriber services such as Advanced Intelligent Networkservices.

Troubleshooting, too

Troubleshooting is high on the priority list of any carrier wishing to keep its network operating smoothly and its customers happy. Historically, this is the most basic use of a surveillance system. Problems will occur as long as there are networks, but the goal is to minimize their number, duration and severity while minimizing troubleshooting costs. Networkwide SS7 surveillance can help a carrier achieve this.

Troubleshooting can be slow and inefficient, even in relatively simple cases. Consider a scenario in which a carrier suddenly begins receiving complaints that calls are not going through. With a traditional facilities-based troubleshooting system, technicians at numerous sites analyze their switches with various tools to determine whether their particular equipment was the cause of the problem. The process entails some guesswork to track down the location and cause of the problem, requires involvement of several technicians at various sites and can take a long time. In short, the process is slow and labor-intensive.

Compare this to the process used if SS7 surveillance capabilities are in place. One technician runs a networkwide call trace, entering only the calling and called number and perhaps an approximate time of one of the failed calls, which is obtained by customer service. The system quickly presents a complete message-by-message trace of the call and its path through the network, and pinpoints where the error originated. A click of the mouse reveals in a matter of seconds the specific reasons why and where the call failed. Figure 3 shows the graphical results of a call trace, which allow an operator to quickly and intuitively understand the networkwide messaging for a particular call.

To verify whether this is the real root cause of complaints, the operator uses another component of the surveillance system: statistical analysis. An analysis is performed on the specific problem area to see how many other calls have been blocked for the same reason and where the network blocked them. The carrier then can proceed with correcting the problem and minimizing the number of affected customers and calls.

Finding, training and retaining skilled troubleshooting technicians with SS7 knowledge is difficult and expensive because of a strong economy and the proliferation of carriers in the U.S. By consolidating troubleshooting tasks into one or a few strategic locations, surveillance systems reduce a carrier's hiring needs and minimize the impact of problems. Scheduling, training and management become more efficient and cost-effective than maintaining individual technicians throughout the network's area.

QOS and other factors

Customers today can shop for voice and data services from a variety of competing carriers. The days of having to accept the offerings of Ma Bell are long gone. Particularly in the wireless world, churn rates are notoriously high as customers search for lower rates and improved service. One of the common reasons that customers change carriers is QOS. Because the high cost of replacing lost customers is well documented, it is important for carriers to reduce the number of customers who leave in the first place. By analyzing the reasons why call attempts are unsuccessful, a carrier can work to reduce the instances of incomplete or failed calls, thus improving the perceived QOS and the number and percentage of completed calls.

Networkwide surveillance also can help a carrier detect growing problems before they begin to affect customers, thus improving QOS. One of the strengths of SS7 is that it is designed to maximize service quality. It attempts to correct errors and successfully complete calls, therefore hiding problems from the customer.

For example, if a problem or error is encountered while a call is being set up, the network will retransmit failed messages to work around the error and allow the call to go through. If a voice circuit is degrading over time, the problem may be hidden by the network's self-correcting capabilities until the circuit fails completely, when customers begin to be affected and an alarm is finally generated.

How can surveillance help? One way is by reporting any errors or problems that the carrier deems important. Through this mechanism, operations personnel become aware of problems earlier and therefore can correct problems before they affect customers.

Service providers can use SS7 surveillance to meet many other business needs:

- Marketing departments can use statistical reports of caller activity to understand which services are being used, when, how often and by whom. The same reports can measure the actual impact of rate changes or other service changes or even response to advertising campaigns.

- Engineering can make use of trend curves and networkwide release code analysis to optimize the allocation of existing network resources, plan future buildouts at the appropriate time, identify areas with significant congestion and tune the network to maximize the number and percentage of completed calls.

- Billing or fraud departments can use fraud detection and analysis applications to minimize this problem, which deprives carriers of an average of 3% of their revenue.

- Customer service can trace individual customer calls quickly and easily to help resolve complaints or billing issues in real time.

In sum, network surveillance systems can be used by any functional group within a carrier to generate and protect revenue, reduce expenses and increase customer satisfaction. Billing, marketing, engineering, operations and customer service are a few examples of areas that can benefit from such a system. The business case for such systems generally is quite strong, with systems often paying for themselves in less than a year. Although surveillance systems with different benefits and drawbacks are available from several sources, narrowing the field to a manageable number is straightforward and largely based on a carrier's size, network, strategy and business goals.