The telecom industry today has reached a point where telcos are struggling to maintain their revenues plainly on conventional service offerings. Today the scenario is so complex that a price rise is a strict no-no for any provider considering a measure to sustain or generate revenues. New revenue streams exist in providing a variety of services and application, and promoting rise in volumes of subscriber usage. Business today has crossed the stage of rivalry and co-existence seems to be the order of the day. Providers now believe in partnering with each other to offer varied services and effective pricing to their customers through Interconnect.

Interconnect entails sharing of networks and voice traffic of different operators by other operators. Statistics prove that it is the second largest revenue generator for providers.

Although Interconnect brings in a lot of advantages, it also does involve a lot many challenges as well. Providers now have to deal with complexity of data records of value-added services such as SMS and MMS coming from disparate systems. This also brings in the need for rating these data records with respect to event, direction and zone. Other vital issues that need to be addressed include complexities in billing, revenue management and settlement posed by multi-disciplinary partners bundling multiple services bundled in a single package. Apart from these, flexibility in billing cycles, reconciliation and revenue assurance and the ever-changing requirements driven by market forces are also areas of prime concern.

Crestel offers a robust and flexible Interconnect Billing solution that enables providers to generate new revenue streams. It offers transparency in interconnect agreements and settlements which is very important when multiple partners with multiple disciplines co-exist. Crestel's Mediation is easily integrable with third party network elements and is capable of being tuned to interpret varied CDR formats for different services. Its dynamic rating engine supports rule-based application of rates allowing providers to adapt easily to changing market dynamics. Besides providing flexibility in billing cycles, Crestel also provides revenue assurance through reconciliation and provides a variety of reports enabling the provider to take business and operational decisions.

Crestel packs rich features in its end-to-end solution offerings for interconnect. Some of the crux features of this solution are discussed below :

Crestel Mediation’s easy-to-use Server Management provides seamless and scalable integration with third party network elements. It allows providers to manage multiple servers and instances. Not only does it map the proprietary CDR formats into downstream system requirements, but it also caters to varied data record formats such as SMS and MMS that come in with the bundling of different services in a single package.

The mediation system provides an interface to map the network attributes with downstream system attributes to form unified CDRs. The parsing function transforms these network attributes into unified form so that downstream functions like rating can interpret it and thereby move on with their own respective functions. It also provides interfaces for configuring rules for checking duplicity, filtering, enriching and validating these records based on various attributes. As part of processing, the mediation system allows further enrichment of these unified attributes to ease decision making for further processes. For example, calls can be classified as NLD and ILD by enriching the value of the Distance Band attribute. Such transformation is a value-added input to the rating process. Mediation communicates with downstream business support systems such as rating, billing and revenue assurance systems. Besides these powerful features, it also enables tracking of CDRs from collection stage to the distribution stage, which is very essential in the interconnect scenario where transparency with partners on revenue-related aspects is extremely critical.

Rating

Rating is another vital aspect in the interconnect scenario. Crestel allows providers to create different rate cards for incoming and outgoing calls and apply them based on charging policies. Policies are framed based on attributes of unified CDRs and they define the criteria for application of rates for incoming as well as outgoing calls. Besides, it also supports differential rating treatment for a single call which runs from peak rate to off-peak rate and vice-versa. Such calls can be rated on a prorated basis, or on the basis of peak rates or off-peak rates. In case of transit partners, a single CDR means a source of credit from the incoming partner and a source of debit towards the termination partner. Crestel’s rate card supports both debit and credit rate specifications to measure upto this requirement. All these features enable providers to speedily gear up with ever-changing rates with credibility. Crestel Rating effectively manages complex rating considering peak & off-peak time, holiday & special day rates, and different rates considering the same destination but different partners. It also provides support for re-rating and re-processing to assuage any possible revenue leakages.

Billing

Crestel provides a secure and robust billing platform for interconnect providers. It is adaptive to changes in rounding policies, calculation of taxes, collection of security deposits, and provides multi-currency support considering international partners. Besides, it also supports an assortment of billing cycles considering the interest of different partners.

Reconciliation

Reconciliation forms an integral part of any interconnect solution. It is important to ensure that there is no revenue leakage taking place due to loss of data records or rating inaccuracies due to manual errors in configuration. Crestel allows providers to set the Allowed Percentage Variation for each partner which acts as a threshold percentage value for reconciling CDRs. Summary or details of partner’s usage can be uploaded in the Interconnect Billing system for reconciliation. Reconciliation can be done on a daily or monthly by comparing the actual usage volume and amount received from or passed to the partner, with the usage data available from the interconnect billing system. Crestel also provides Partner Level Reconciliation and Daily Reconciliation Reports. It also ensures that there is no loss of revenue by allowing tracking of CDRs in all stages of the mediation process. It also provides re-rating and re-processing support to plug any leakage.

Reports

Crestel provides various kinds of reports targeting different audience. These reports aid concerned personnel to monitor and take corrective measures based on hard facts depicted in them. The following is a partial list of reports that are provided as part of the offering:

MIS Reports provide information based on which partnership profitability can be gauged.

Reconciliation Reports provide an insight into the revenue inflows and outflows.

Engineering Reports provide information on network behavior and utilization. Technical problems, if any, can be spotted and corrective measures taken to eliminate them.

Crestel’s end-to-end interconnect billing brings in huge benefits for providers, partners and customers with its 4C approach.

Low TCO

An increase in subscriber base or number of partners does not necessarily increase capital or operational expenditure. Built on J2EE technology, the system is scalable and is designed to run multiple instances across multiple machines. Mediation subsystems like collection, parsing, processing, distribution and integration can be run on separate machines. Crestel thus reduces the total cost of ownership and response time for providers.

Easy in Operations

Intuitive and easy-to-use graphical user interfaces contribute to operational ease. Crestel also supports re-processing and re-rating.

Flexibility in Agreements

Crestel provides flexibility in agreement with partners. Revenue leakages can be tracked easily through reports based on percentage deviations configured in partner accounts.

Faster Response to Changing Market Dynamics

Crestel Rating is based on rules which are rapidly configurable based on changing market scenarios. These changes can be absorbed easily in the system. An array of billing cycles are supported to cater to requirements of billing.

Single Platform

Crestel provides a single platform encompassing interconnect mediation, rating and billing.

Competition

The system promotes healthy competition and allows providers to get the best at reasonal costs. Crestel integrates easily with third party systems, thus providing multi-vendor support. This ensures that the provider is not stuck up with a single vendor. Rule-based mediation and rating ensure faster roll-outs for interconnect operators. The system also provides efficient handling of partner agreements and provides reports that enable them to take prudent decisions based on hard facts instead of assumptions. Reconciliation ensures that the avenues for revenue leakage are brought into notice so that corrective measures can be taken to seal them.