Managing international dial codes

Telecommunications Americas, June, 2004 by Chuck Parrish

The wholesale international interconnect market is a highly competitive and rapidly changing line of business.

Traditionally, interconnected carriers conduct business by exchanging termination rates to specific countries, cities or regions. The locations are defined by dial-code details. This detail provides each carrier with significant risk and opportunity.

One significant industry-wide problem is the lack of a single standard for international numbering plans. Niche international markets evolve seemingly overnight. The rapid fluctuation makes ITU dial-codes inherently outdated, and they don't reflect the way business is transacted. With the rapid expansion of mobile services such as paging and GPRS and an increasing use of number translation services geared to both public and private applications, a continuous pattern of number plans and change band breakouts has developed.

This problem translates into increased carrier risk with each carrier defining its "view" of the world in the form of its own dial-codes. A carrier's dial-codes drive its cost, routing, pricing and billing operations. The risk begins with the differences in how each carrier defines the dial-codes and the pricing associated with those differences (see Figure 1).

Assume Carrier A routed 1 million France minutes (50 percent proper, 50 percent mobile) to Carrier X in a month, and half the France proper minutes (250,000) were treated by Carrier X as France mobile. This results in the unexpected billing of an extra $0.1350 per minute (the difference between the $0.1925 mobile rate and the $0.0575 proper rate) for each of these minutes--a total unexpected cost to Carrier A of $33,750.

To make matters worse, time multiplies the risk. Carrier A has probably already sent another million minutes to Carrier X while the invoice was being created, sent and audited so the impact is doubled.

A typical carrier is interconnected to between 40 and 100 carriers, each of which is sending multiple rate and dial-code change notifications each month. Each offer contains details ranging from a few to as many as 1000 international breakouts. A couple of simple calculations results in estimated offer detail volumes of between 40,000 and 300,000 per month.

The time required to receive, validate, analyze and input these details into the system can be huge. Business process analysts typically spend a majority of their time on low-value data manipulation to get to the high-value analysis of the exceptions.

Invoice audit teams then spend an inordinate amount of time disputing invoices where discrepancies are directly attributable to dial-code differences.

Mistakes Cost Thousands

Offers are typically processed by mapping destination names, making dial-code assumptions or by performing analysis of dial-codes sporadically whenever and wherever possible. For many carriers, this is a time-consuming manual process. Considering the volume of details and the short timeframe to get offers processed and available for routing, quality and accuracy are often sacrificed. A mistake in the offer translation stage, for example applying a $0.05 proper rate when a $0.15 mobile rate should have been used, can lead to thousands of dollars in unexpected costs.

At the heart of the issue is the carrier's fixed list of dial-codes to international destinations--its so-called "view of the world." The first step to dealing with this problem is to stop mapping vendor rate offers at the destination name and start using the underlying vendor dial-codes to identify matches to the carrier's fixed list. When vendor dial-codes match precisely to the fixed list, no risk is introduced.

Risks and opportunity are introduced when vendor dial-codes do not match the carrier's fixed list.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Beyond Prevention

Effective dial-code management is the heart of a well-managed interconnect business. The sheer magnitude of vendor rates and dial-codes and the number of internal systems and network elements makes this a problem beyond manual or human capabilities.

Carriers' fixed lists of dial-codes are used throughout their systems. Network switches and OSS systems each have a set of destinations and dial-codes used for call routing and reporting. Costing, invoice audit and reconciliation, and billing and settlement systems may also have separate lists of destinations and dial-codes. If not managed carefully and integrated tightly across this array of systems, a carrier can have difficulty managing and optimizing its interconnect business.

To manage dial-codes effectively, many carriers are turning to holistic solutions with flexible capabilities to address each of the following aspects of interconnect. Each area has different needs, but effective dial-code management is a key to success across the board.

* Trading with vendors. Capturing full details of vendor offers creates a repository for vendor rate and dial-code offers, enables identification of discrepancies in dial-codes leading to risk or cost-reduction opportunities, and provides vendors feedback on the quality and consistency of their offer content.