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International Issue: November 2005
Rest assured on IMS?
The full benefits of IMS in the mobile world will only be realised if the appropriate revenue assurance solutions are in place
by Stephen Stanislaw
However you look at it, the whole metabolism of our industry is now speeding up once again. Not only are new technologies — such as IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) — starting to be deployed but a mobile service provider’s success or failure now increasingly depends on how quickly they can adjust their business models to take advantage of new opportunities and deliver them to their customers.
This implicit need for speed — whether in terms of new business partnerships with content and application providers or in the delivery of ever more complex new services — presents its own particular challenges. On one hand, the underlying systems must be as open as possible for ease of use and access at both ends of the value chain. On the other, they must be securely protected against revenue leakage and fraud to create a trusted environment for all the players involved and to protect the service provider itself against financial or reputational loss.
This is where new approaches to revenue assurance have a significant part to play in supporting the creativity of the mobile business development and marketing communities. Only by knowing that revenue streams are secure and reliable — from the raw data events collected across the network to the financial information exchanged with customers and partners — can a real spirit of innovation thrive profitably.
Service access for all
The technical challenges at first look daunting. Throughout its history, the mobile industry has been able to segment users into pre- and post-paid customer groupings, each supported by its own type of billing system. Credit balances for prepaid customers have to be managed as real-time as possible — particularly when they are roaming abroad — to prevent revenue loss.
Post-paid customers have traditionally been billed via systems designed to batch-process large volumes of transactions rather than to support real-time accounting, but could have their accounts monitored early on to detect any anomalous activities that could indicate fraud.
With the current drive in mobile communications to make as many services as possible safely available to as many people as possible, this rigid separation is no longer sustainable and customers must have access to a wide range of different ways of paying.
Compounding this challenge is the reality that many new services — especially the IP-based data and content applications — will co-exist simultaneously with traditional PSTN services. A 2.5G or 3G user may be using a handset for a voice call, then break off part way through to send an Instant Message or an MMS to the caller, before returning to the voice session. These activities need to be tracked by the billing systems involved and all the relevant databases need to be checked and speedily updated.
This issue of transaction authorisations — whether it’s a simple voice call or a content-based exchange — is a particularly thorny one in the emerging next-generation networks environment. The customer wants an instant response when they push a button on their handset and, with many online purchasing decisions for games and content being impulse-based, they won’t be prepared to wait.
While much time and effort has gone into enabling this type of response for pre-paid voice services, the signalling and IT infrastructure that supported this was far simpler than that required by today’s emergent multimedia services.
IMS: protecting the ‘IP Metering System’
Several examples of how transaction-based services tax traditional telecom management and auditing functions are evident with IMS. For a start, there’s an almost exponential increase in the amount of signalling traffic required to support these advanced services, much of it using new protocols such as SIP and Parlay. Secondly, the IMS environment is open and highly distributed; delays of a few milliseconds here or there while credit ratings or adult authorisations are checked can all too soon add up to an experience that is intolerable for the user. Given that much of the 3G business case is built upon encouraging experimentation by the users themselves, anything that inhibits this must be avoided.
Here the industry has to struggle against the old ‘silo’ mentality of systems design and operational responsibilities that may have worked well during the early days of telecom but which now imposes onerous burdens of cost and complexity on mobile service providers. While the IMS environment holds the promise of consolidating some customer information within the network address section and simplifying access control and charging information, the issues stretch much further, particularly when wider corporate responsibilities are added to the equation.
New demands on revenue assurance
After the financial debacles that hit the telecom industry recently, there is now a renewed and enforced focus on good corporate governance. Reflected by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the US and similar initiatives under way in other countries around the world, senior executives are now personally responsible for the integrity of their businesses — and that increasingly involves revenue assurance issues. In this context, the presence of ‘silos’ hinders the efficiency of good revenue assurance practices and has the potential to widely impact stakeholder confidence in a mobile service provider.
As we examine this complex backdrop, it quickly becomes clear that any revenue assurance systems able to cope with the new demands being made upon them must have a certain set of defining characteristics:
- They must have the ability to enable the automatic correction of data discrepancies back to the source systems. Without this facility, error-generating inaccuracies may remain uncorrected in core systems, leading to the continual waste of time and human resources to fix recurring problems. Very often, adopting a human-intensive, traditional process can lead to the service providers spending more on solving problems than they actually win back from lost revenue.
- They must have as broad a range of revenue assurance applications as possible in order to act as a flexible toolbox, capable of handling both current and emerging needs. Examples of specific applications include those capable of supporting generic assurance procedures with billing, switching, inventory, usage, service orders and rating systems, as well as fulfilling the unique demands of the IP and wireless environments. It is increasingly difficult to predict the cross-technology demands of the future environment where, for example, supporting a TV game show might involve the service provider in handling SMS, MMS, Internet and voice calls in an integrated way.
- They must be based on an open and modular platform that allows the easy and quick integration of other systems and applications from third parties, giving the owner a single overview of multiple systems from a single interface. With the increasing diversity of interconnected applications — some of which will be outside the direct control of the service provider — solutions must be easily configurable in a standardised way and built on a componentised structure.
- They must have the ability to bridge the current divide between the engineering and management domains and cultures. This will necessarily involve using an integrated analytical dashboard that can provide a single, enterprise-wide view of revenue assurance activities across the organisation. While providing non-technical executives with sight of business objectives, key metrics and performance measurements, the same interface should also allow engineering staff to drill down to the lowest levels of network or system detail. By standardising the processes involved, non-technical staff can come to appreciate the role that revenue assurance plays in ensuring a proper return on investment.
- They must support the growing requirements for commercial and financial transparency demanded by national and international regulators. With government regulation such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act well advanced, service providers must show that they can respond quickly to regulatory change; however, without the right systems and disciplines in place, this process is likely to be slow, onerous and expensive, especially over the longer term. If service providers invest now, they have a chance of recouping their investment very quickly from a variety of directions.
At the end of the day, IMS will bring huge benefits. This can only happen, however, if the supporting revenue assurance systems can mirror and exploit the same holistic, truly integrated concepts that IMS is intended to support.
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