Chasing WNP

No issue will affect wireless providers, in terms of cost and labor, more than wireless number portability (WNP) over the next two years. When all is said and done, providers may have spent more than a billion dollars to implement a system that might drastically change the landscape of the already cut-throat competitive industry. WNP affects all aspects of provider operation: billing, networks, switches, number administration and churn rates. Mix all these well, and it just might work. WNP is a complicated matter and will require extensive testing; providers need to stop delaying and select their WNP solution now if they hope to meet the November 2002 deadline. The WNP requirement is here to stay. If providers do not move toward WNP now, their business may port away.

---

Wireless number portability challenges the way providers think, stretches network capacity and strains back-office systems. And the FCC deadline is approaching.

Contemplate this. You buy a new car but can't drive it because your old license-plate number is vehicle-specific. Government and automakers haven't yet established a workable transfer process. How long would this situation be tolerated in the United States? Not long.

But today's wireless subscriber faces a similar situation if he wants to change service providers and keep his phone number.

So the FCC mandated LNP for wireline subscribers with the intention of requiring wireless number portability (WNP) soon after. LNP already has been implemented in the top 100 MSAs. This so-called Phase I of LNP has forced wireless-service providers to accommodate calls to and from ported wireline telephone numbers.

To accomplish this first step, wireless providers have chosen one of three solutions. Pay the N-1 provider to perform the dip query into the Number Portability Administration Center (NPAC) to determine if the number in question has been ported, and if so, how to route the call. Or pay a service bureau to perform the porting functionality. The third solution is for a provider to establish its own LNP database and portability functionality. Although expensive, this last option is probably best.

By Nov. 24, 2002, the FCC is requiring wireless-service providers to accommodate WNP, which presents another technical challenge — one that certainly will cost the industry dearly in time and money.

Although no provider interviewed for this article would estimate the cost of LNP/WNP adherence, network upgrades and other associated costs will add up, no matter which solution you choose. But because the FCC has mandated LNP and WNP, providers really have no choice.

"No one has any idea how much LNP will cost," said Michele Young, a principal at Youngideas, a telecommunications consulting firm. "The vendors don't know, the service providers don't know, even the wireline folks don't know. LNP/WNP makes Y2K look like a drop in the proverbial bucket. I've been telling all of my clients to budget big bucks for LNP capital and operational expenses. Most haven't because they are still in denial and think the FCC will grant further or final forbearance. They won't."

OK. Now that we've established that, how do you go about ensuring a workable LNP/WNP solution?

MDN-MIN Separation — A Big Shift
A major operational theory of wireless networks is that the mobile directory number (MDN) and the MIN are essentially one in the same. With the advent of LNP/WNP, this will change.

The NPA-NXX will no longer identify which service provider the customer belongs to.

"The MIN and the MDN are as different as your passport and your Social Security number," said Ben Levitan, GTE-TSI manager of technology standards.

Today these numbers are perceived as being the same. Technically, they are different, and this difference becomes important in the portable realm.

"They both service different purposes," Levitan said. "The MIN is internally used and the MDN external. With the advent of LNP, MDNs go with the customers and MINs stay with the service provider."

Providers need to understand what parts of their systems use the MIN and which use the MDN. They also need to ask questions such as, "Will my billing system look up customer information based on the MDN or the MIN?"

Vendors developing LNP/WNP solutions are answering these questions — and a host of others. Though some providers have chosen their paths, many wireless companies still are mapping their plans of attack.

But according to Young, service providers have a lot of work to do between now and the FCC's 2002 deadline.

"WNP cannot be implemented on a serial basis," she said. "For roaming to continue, a flash cut is required. Thus, the entire industry must be ready in November 2002. Are we? No. Will we be? Probably not. CTIA is a large part of the problem in that they are many months behind schedule in selecting an administrator to keep the MINs separate from the MDNs. I assess the probability to be about 75% that we will not be ready."

According to a draft of Wireless Number Portability: Technical, Operational and Implementation Requirements Phase II created by the WNP Subcommittee for North American Numbering Council (NANC), in a number-portability environment, existing subscribers not yet ported most likely will have the same number for both MIN and MDN. When a subscriber does port, the MDN and MIN become separate and distinct. The ported subscriber's MDN will remain unchanged and port with the subscriber. The ported subscriber will surrender the MIN to the donor network and receive a new MIN from the recipient network. The donor network can reuse the relinquished MIN for another subscriber. It's possible that the same number may be used for an MDN in one network and a MIN in another network.

According to NANC's WNP report, porting wireless providers must upgrade all network nodes and test all call scenarios for subscribers before deployment in November 2002. The report estimates this process will take 18 to 24 months to complete. That gives providers just enough time to ensure a smooth WNP transition 26 months from now. The clock is ticking.

Build, Buy or Default?
With LNP, the three aforementioned options — a turnkey LNP system, outsourcing to a service bureau or defaulting to the LEC — all use similar technical systems in different ways. With WNP, these and other choices must be made by providers.

Rebecca Stillings, Illuminet senior product manager of number portability services, works on WNP standards committees and suggested a plan of action for providers.

"In today's environment, what the wireless carriers really need is the ability to complete calls to ported numbers," she said. "They can do that a number of ways. They can default route, which means they just hand it off to the network defined by the NPA-NXX. Or they can deploy their own local routing-number database. Or they can use a third party like Illuminet.

"What we've done is contracted with all seven of the regional NPACs and taken downloads and have that in our LNP database," Stillings said. Providers with SS7 connectivity to a database such as Illuminet's can launch queries to determine routing information for ported calls.

With WNP, Illuminet's service will not change from a data-access perspective.

"What will change is our service-order-administration (SOA) product," Stillings said. "We have not yet deployed the wireless requirements because we were waiting to ensure that they are firm. However, we will be fully prepared to offer (wireless-service providers) our SOA."

Illuminet has developed a 3-page task list for service providers to meet number-portability requirements by 2002, beyond enabling LNP on the wireline side. Although the list is still in development, Stillings laid forth the following suggestions:

• Go through a SOA selection process.

• Select a method for communicating service-order information with the NPACs.

• Develop a relationship with the NPAC and undergo all certification testing with the NPAC to ensure that circuits are in place.

• Update your MSD, if you haven't already started doing that for call completion.

• Upgrade switches and test with new query types.

• Establish global-title-translation routing.

• Establish SS7 connectivity.

• Establish access to routing information by either provisioning your in-house database or contract with a third party (vendor).

• If you decide to maintain your own database, complete all vendor selection for your LNP database and your LNP service-management system (LSMS), all of your hardware acquisition, software deployment, certification testing, acceptance testing, provisioning of circuits, provisioning of your monitoring system, and connectivity to the NPACs. Additionally, perform all certification testing and the MNPs associated with maintaining those two systems.

SOA Selection
An important part of the WNP solution is the selection of a SOA process, said Maggie Lee, Illuminet number portability senior technology analyst.

Wireline LNP solutions are fine up until porting is necessary between wireless and wireless or wireless to wireline, Lee said. It's at this point that providers have to install "the other side of the picture," which is the SOA that actually provides the provisioning to port between providers.

"This is actually the SOA that connects to the NPAC to create and activate ported information," Lee said. "They have three choices there again. They can go out and do an RFI/RFP for SOA vendors and get their own SOA in; they can use a service bureau SOA; or they can use the low-tech interface (LTI). That is a dial-up system they can use to do this creation and activation of ported TNs."

Lee suggested a LTI may benefit smaller providers without the resources for a SOA.

Whatever alternative you choose, make sure the system is reliable, and can handle the increased capacity that WNP will create. Customers won't care why their phones aren't functioning properly after porting; they'll just go find another service provider. It's up to you to make sure the NPAC sent the right data to the LSMS, which then updated the number-portability database (NPDB), which then successfully routed the call to the switch.

Completing the dip, or query, when a call enters your network is number portability's largest challenge, according to Donna Hildebrand, Tekelec STP-LNP North American line product manager.

"If the originator has not done the dip, the N-1 provider, or the second-to-last switch in the network, will do that dip so that the call will be connected to the right end point," she said. "If I'm a wireless provider, say, a small guy in the field today, and I don't have LNP, I will basically get charged for that dip by some other carrier along the way. If I have a great deal of activity ... I could get substantial monthly charges coming back to me. That is the business case for installing LNP in your network to begin with. It will decrease your costs, and it's a mandated service; you really have no choice. You have to provide it."

The challenge in putting LNP into your network, Hildebrand said, is interaction with the NPACs, which act as clearinghouses for the activation and deactivation of numbers.

Providers must manage their LNP databases and make sure all of the numbers in them are there at all times.

"If you say you're going to do LNP, and you do not have the numbers (to do) your dips, you will have FCC complaints, which no carrier wants to get," Hildebrand said. "If I ported my call, and I don't have my number in the database because something failed, my call can't complete. People do register complaints with the FCC, and they get back to the carriers. That's not a good position to be in."

Getting LNP up and running is a database and a network challenge, she said. And that database is growing.

"You can't start gradually; you have to start with the total current database," Hildebrand said, noting the database is at seven to eight million (ported) numbers for the United States and growing by close to one million a month. In November of 2002, even a higher degree of activity is expected.

"What's going to be the churn rate in the wireless industry once you can port a number?" she asked.

TCAP Traffic Increases
Atul Thaipen, Telcordia senior systems engineer, said WNP would increase TCAP traffic substantially on provider networks.

"The solution that was chosen for WNP is called the location-routing-number (LRN) solution and is the same for wireline number portability," Thaipen said. "When a number is ported out of an NXX, the whole NXX becomes portable. So the mobile switch will have to recognize the portable NXX and do a query for that particular number and for every single call. That means launching queries to number-portability databases, which are essentially service-control points (SCPs), and receiving a LRN back and routing the call based on the LRN and not on the MDN," Thaipen said.

"Somebody did a study and figured out that on average there would be at least two calls per subscriber which will require number-portability database queries, and for 100,000 subscribers, the number of queries could be up to four million per month," he said. "That is going to substantially increase the TCAP (query) traffic in the network."

Increases in database size and potentially higher churn rates make the case for beefed-up links, said Walt Mansell, director of the telecommunications practice at Belenos, a consulting firm.

"You can't do away with the necessity of making dips, but usually in an SS7 network, you do a data dip through a SCP," Mansell said. "With LNP, usually the SCPs handle between 500 and 700 dips per second, whereas when you get into signal-transfer points (STP), an STP can do on the order of 20,000 (per second). What companies are doing is rather than putting this LNP database in a SCP that is relatively slow, they are attaching the database right to the STP. It allows for a faster dip.

"LNP also has an effect on the number of A-links a central office has," he said, suggesting that with the increased number of data dips riding on the A-links, companies are likely to go to 1.5Mb or higher A-links to the STP. "When you're doing all these data dips, you're obviously going to need multiple A-links," Mansell said. "Why fool around with 56.6kb links; just put in a 1.5Mb link and forget it."

WNP: A Primary Concern
Providers are working on WNP, but many need to start working faster, according to some of the primary solution vendors.

Bryan Mordecai, Telcordia director of product marketing, said wireless-service providers fall on both sides of the preparation fence. For some, WNP is a money issue. With others, it's just not the top priority.

"It's fair to say that many of them are stepping up to the plate already and are preparing specs and moving forward with their (WNP solution) vendor-selection process," Mordecai said.

On the other hand, some providers regard WNP as a secondary concern.

"I think it's fair to say that a big issue at the moment is the whole business of wireless data and wireless business applications," he said. "Some carriers are putting a lot of their resources ... behind offering those services."

Telcordia's Thaipen said the cost of WNP solutions certainly will be substantial. "Some carriers are looking at number portability and some others are not. One thing is for sure, and that is the cost of implementing number portability is going to be significant; it's going to be high."

Cost may be scaring off providers. But educating them would be a step in the right direction. Illuminet's Lee said attendance by providers at industry meetings has been low.

"I think one of the biggest challenges is getting the wireless providers to be part of the whole process," Lee said. "Now we see just a handful of wireless representatives at the industry meetings — at the LNPA working group — and it's mostly the bigger wireless carriers," said Lee, who in July attended the WNP Subcommittee meeting in Chicago to develop the intercarrier test plan for WNP. "The challenge is to really get those carriers who don't come to these meetings and aren't aware of what they need to do, to start working and looking at how they are going to implement number portability," Lee said. "Whether it's putting in their own systems, which of course means doing RFI/RFPs, or using a service bureau or default routing and using some other mechanism — maybe a low-tech interface rather than a SOA — all those issues really need to be addressed so they're not under the gun come 2001 and into 2002."

---

WNP Willies

Major wireless-service providers likely have begun selecting wireless-number-portability (WNP) solutions, but they aren't talking. One company spokesman said network engineers were unwilling to comment about WNP work because many issues are not yet resolved.

The volume of number-portability queries is going to increase exponentially when WNP is implemented in 2002, and networks will have to stretch to accommodate the growth. Engineering networks to handle new traffic and successfully administering number change will be difficult.

"Everybody right now is saying, 'We're fine where we are now, and we can handle what we're doing. But we have to all have our eye toward what's happening at 2002,'" said Donna Hildebrand, Tekelec STP-LNP North American line product manager. "Because then, I think, the word 'exponential' will be correct to use (in reference to the expansion of the database created by LNP). Now, carriers are spending all their time worried about their back-office systems to make sure LNP is supported, because if you can't get a number activated and deactivated simultaneously, you've sort of negated the system," she said, adding that this is the main reason for the delay in implementation.

Despite some weak knees, at least one provider was willing to talk about its LNP solution. Alltel is preparing for WNP in 2002, but certain issues have to be worked out.

Frank Scheuneman, Alltel vice president-network operations, described his company's wireline LNP system.

"Alltel's solution is twofold," he said. "At this point, we are sending our queries to the Bell tandems, and we're now deploying infrastructure that will allow us to have our own LNP database capabilities through a triggerless solution."

Alltel is addressing wireline number portability by developing the network capability to receive database downloads from NPACs.

"We have deployed a database and service-control-point (SCP) functionality at multiple points in our networks where our LNP queries can be launched to and responded back to the querying office whether it's an MSC or a wireline switch, CLEC switch or whatever," he said. "In other words, we've established a database infrastructure to handle our own LNP dips, rather than having to go to another carrier."

The reason for deploying an internal database infrastructure to handle LNP queries -- rather than paying another party for the service? Simple business math, Scheuneman said. "Just like any business opportunity, we chose to spend the capital up-front to have long-term savings."

He said Alltel's wireline LNP operation is "humming along" despite some challenges in setting porting standards between providers.

As for WNP, Scheuneman was not as bullish.

"I don't see a lot of activity in the industry right now looking at those related complications in preparation for 2002," he said. "And, a lot of the vendors don't have that software available as well. This time next year might be a better time to talk about the specifics in that area."

Now Alltel is complying with Phase I, which allows it to terminate landline customers that are ported.

"For Phase I, we are implementing triggerless capability," he said. "As you know, the switch-vendor community has a lot to deliver to provide full Phase II portability in the wireless switches as well. That will continue to develop over the next couple of years. Right now we're continuing to build out our LNP capabilities on our SS7 network. And we are migrating onto our own platforms here as quickly as possible."

Scheuneman, echoing the frustrations of many in the wireless industry, said separation of the MIN and mobile directory number (MDN) was creating many challenges — challenges that still begged for solutions.

"The main challenge that sticks in our craw is that the mobile identification number and mobile directory number now are going to be two different numbers," he said. "I would say that a lot of what we do is MDN-based, so that presents OSS challenges and billing challenges."

As for cost, Scheuneman declined to offer a dollar amount, and instead said, "Most of our business models right now are based on minimizing cost and meeting FCC compliance."