Racing to Next Gen

The contest ain't over 'til you get paid.

After Maurice Greene sprinted across the finish line ahead of his peers this past summer and won the Olympics 100-meter track and field finals, he had the luxury of putting the race behind him. He could sit back and collect his gold and glory.

Competitors in the race to the next generation have no such luxury. Even if you win the race and the glory of being the first to launch the newest generation of wireless services in your market, it's a Pyrrhic victory if you can't monitor, analyze and bill subscribers for the value-added services.

“The focus, like in all new technology, seems to be the technology and the application,” said Martin Demers, Ace*Comm senior vice president of marketing and development. “Sometimes people forget that somebody has to pay for all of this. People forget to think about how usage is going to be measured, how usage records are going to be collected and what (system) they are going to use to do their billing.”

Ace*Comm sells mediation and operation-support-system products that are used to collect call and transaction data from various sources, including circuit-switched, packet-switched and IP networks. The company works with vendors such as Cisco Systems, Motorola, Oracle and Siemens to develop products that can be integrated into switching and software systems.

While working with network and switch vendors, Demers has observed that carriers often add usage-record generation and collection functions to their systems as an afterthought. They focus first on the technology, Demers said, then figure, “Somebody needs to pay for this. We better generate usage records.”

Lessons From the Past

What are carriers doing to prepare their networks to collect data from IP networks?

“Lighting a lot of candles, I would assume,” Steve Lyons joked.

Lyons, Alltel senior business analyst for billing, then explained why Alltel's billing execs won't need to hold a candle-lighting vigil preceding the roll-out of its cdma2000 network, which is scheduled to launch in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, LA, during the second half of this year.

Alltel already has dealt with usage-collection issues in packet-based networks.

“We have these issues in our wireline business because we have packet networks on the wireline side,” Lyons said. “A lot of these issues are going to be new to the wireless business, but they're not without precedent in the telecom industry.”

Even on the wireless side of its business, Alltel has faced some of the complexities of extracting usage information from IP networks. The company operates CDPD networks in Phoenix, Cleveland and Tampa, FL.

“CDPD gives us a lot of insight into some of the practical pitfalls of managing and billing for a wireless IP-based network,” Lyons said. “I'm not sure that it provides any level of evolution into 3G. But it provides us with a whole lot of expertise and background information.”

One big lesson Alltel learned from its CDPD experience is that keeping track of IP-services usage depends on the ability to manage and assign IP numbers and use them as subscriber identifiers.

“We've all built our thought processes and our billing systems to be based on the phone number being the unique network identifier of a customer,” Lyons said. “Particularly if you do revenue reporting for markets or regions based on phone numbers, you can rely on NPAs (numbering plan areas) and NXXs (exchanges or prefixes) to give you a geographic association between the phone numbers and your markets. IP numbers don't have that type of logic, unless you can assign them internally that way. And if you have dynamically assigned IP numbers, that's even messier because the IP address changes every session. So you have to have other ways to identify the customer.”

The fundamental difference between IP and traditional telecom networks creates an added layer of complexity. Circuit-switched networks are centralized. A subscriber's calls travel through a switch, and his usage can be monitored through that switch. But in the decentralized IP environment, information about one call travels along multiple routes such as through a telecom switch, a WAP gateway and an application server.

Lyons mused about the possible complications of usage monitoring and billing as data services become more sophisticated and carriers' relationships with content and service providers become more intricate. He conjured the image of a subscriber roaming on Alltel's packet network. Distracted by a coffee craving, the subscriber uses a location-based service to locate the nearest Starbucks on a portable device, then accesses the coffee vendor's Web site and orders online so that his drink will be ready when he arrives at the store.

In Lyons's scenario, Starbucks has agreed to pay for the call whenever a customer orders coffee over Alltel's network. Such an arrangement would complicate the billing process, because Alltel would have to deduct the transaction for the subscriber's bill and add it to Starbucks' tab.

“That's a kind of out-there scenario,” Lyons admitted. “But that's the type of thing that will happen, settlement with advertisers, settlement with content providers. The complexity is going to be preparing the infrastructure today for the things that might happen tomorrow.”

To prepare for the applications of tomorrow, Alltel is trying to create a billing enterprise that is adaptable and operates on open architectures.

“You've got to have an infrastructure that's adaptive and flexible, because you may not get six to 12 months of lead time to develop things or issue requests for proposals,” Lyons said.

Vendors can help carriers by creating standards-based rather than proprietary architectures for their products and by considering carriers' billing and back-office needs, Lyons said.

Studying the Course

Anita Tsui, SmarTone spokesperson, said that vendors need to create standards that enable different kinds of routers and servers to communicate, as well as those that comply with existing data formats such as the TAP3 and Ciber roaming settlement formats.

SmarTone plans to launch its 3G network in 2002, if it is awarded a 3G license. The planning and preparation for IP usage data collection will take at least six months, Tsui said. But ultimately, the preparation time requirement depends on the complexity of the services the company decides to offer.

According to Tsui, the biggest challenge probably will be collecting roaming data.

“The mechanism and standards for data collection from roaming partners are still not yet determined,” she said.

Unresolved issues relative to roaming include whether carriers will charge each other based on time, volume, flat rates or using some other method and how data from various IP sources will be aggregated and analyzed.

Preparing for the Transition

Unfortunately, there is more than one answer to the question of how to collect usage information from IP networks.

“There are a variety of players in the IP-mediation environment and most of them have a different perspective on where you should measure usage,” said Ace*Comm's Demers. “Should you use probes? Should you be collecting data from the network-management platform? Should you be collecting data from the actual network elements?”

When a wireless network carries data from the Internet, a device known as a probe can be used to monitor the data stream and measure usage that way, Demers explained. Information also can be gathered from IP routers and network gateways.

Ace*Comm prefers to connect to all of the network gateways involved in a transaction to get an exact measurement of usage.

“But there are people that will connect to the network-management platform and gather statistics on usage rather than precise usage,” Demers said. “Right now, the most widely used, secure and reliable way is to gather the actual data that the network elements generate. But in some cases, that doesn't give you the complete picture, so you also need information from proxy servers and other devices in the network that allow you to identify the user of the services.”

Mark Fowlie, Amdocs vice president of product marketing, said that examples of network elements containing access information include:

• The WAP gateway

• Application servers, which hold application-usage information

• Commerce servers, which contain information about trade transactions

• AAA servers, which produce user-ID information.

During the build-out of next-generation networks, companies will have nationwide networks that will be a mixture of 1G, 2G, 2.5G and 3G technologies.

“This situation creates the requirement for convergence at the mediation and/or billing area,” Fowlie said. “A convergent mediation layer collects information from all of the network technologies and routes it to the appropriate customer-care and billing system. A convergent customer care and billing system removes the need for a convergent mediation layer in that there is only one customer care and billing system for all services.”

Amdocs works with mediation providers, which extract usage information from the switch, correlate it and pass it on to Amdocs for rating and mediation. In addition, the company is a member of the IPDR Organization, an association of vendors and a few carriers that has set out to define how to measure and exchange IP-related information between network elements, operation-support systems and business-support systems.

Hewlett-Packard also belongs to the IPDR Organization and has been studying the mediation needs created by merging wireless and the Internet for the past year and a half. The company recently released a version of its Internet mediation software that can extract information from Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia network equipment, as well as other wireless network elements.

“The IPDR Organization's basic plan and function is to make sure that we can continue to measure service for consumers or intercarrier,” said Tom Russotto, Ace*Comm CTO. Russotto also serves as chairman of the IPDR Organization Interoperability Pavilion.

“We think it's going to be very important to set some standards that essentially the whole world can use to eliminate some of the problems that we have in the legacy world with so many different formats of information,” Russotto said. “The effort within the IPDR Organization is a really good one for industry. But it would be helpful to have more carriers in there telling us about the things they're thinking about the future — the services they want to offer, the kinds of billing plans, the kinds of problems they anticipate with fraud, for instance, or network management or quality of service.”

In October, the IPDR released Version 2 of its network-data management-usage standard. Version 2.5 of the standard, released in February, defines data-exchange elements for a variety of services.