Today's international service providers are facing new margin challenges, new technologies, new regulatory changes and new business models. Telarix has introduced a number of NGN Solutions for iXTools to enable carriers to add the capabilities they need to help manage the latest business challenges. These Platform Package Solutions provide enhanced end-to-end functionality across multiple iXTools modules.
The Enhanced Platform Solutions Packages include:
Mobile Number Portability (MNP)
The growth in the number of fixed, mobile and VoIP carriers, in parallel with the explosion in global traffic volumes, has compounded the complexity of managing a carrier's international business. In particular, the increase in traffic to mobile destinations has created significant cost and arbitrage exposures to a carrier's international business as more countries adopt mobile number portability (MNP). As more mobile numbers within those countries become ported, dial code-based routing and rating is being rendered obsolete. Telarix's MNP solution reduces these financial risks by enabling service providers to properly identify, route and rate traffic based on network ID instead of dial code. This solution enables carriers to manage their margin exposure to cost differences between mobile carriers. By rating and billing traffic from wholesale customers at the appropriate rate, the MNP solution eliminates the arbitrage risk of receiving a high mix of ported traffic from another carrier.
Customer Specific Destinations (CSD)
Another challenging issue service providers face today is related to dial codes. These carrier specific codes are used to determine costs, routes for traffic, and ultimately the final settlements paid to and received from other carriers. Without an industry-wide standard for dial codes, it is common to have a dial code mismatch between vendor and customer dial code plans; for example, when a given dial code is part of a city destination or a "Rest of Country" pool. Larger carriers with active wholesale trading businesses, high traffic volumes and larger staffs commonly adopt very granular dial code structures to eliminate dial code arbitrage risk. However, some customers may prefer simpler dial code structures and may be reluctant to buy from carriers whose offers contain a large number of breakouts. Telarix's Customer Specific Destination (CSD) solution enables service providers to create customer-specific offers tailored to their customers destination structure while still managing their internal dial codes in an optimal way for routing and margin management. CSD rate plans then become the basis for rating and billing each customer's traffic, highlighting the advantage of the seamless integration within iXTools.
SMS Rating
Service providers can also leverage iXTools' flexible, event-driven architecture to expand their wholesale business to include MMS, SMS, IPTV and other content rather than purchasing separate systems for wholesale rating, billing, and partner management. iXTools's state-of-the-art agreement structure for volume discounts, multi-party settlement, rebates and other complex wholesale agreements ensures each event is captured, rated and billed.
VoIP Service Management
To address the ever growing needs of wholesale VoIP businesses, including rating, routing and quality of service challenges, Telarix has introduced a VoIP Platform solution. This innovative approach enables VoIP service providers to leverage iXTools' capabilities for their VoIP business, enabling capabilities such as using Mean Opinion Score (MOS) as the primary Quality of Service (QoS) benchmark, QoS reporting on all relevant VoIP statistics, ENUM driven routing, softswitch/IMS route guide provisioning with Telarix's iXTranslate module, and managing different routing and rating policies for VoIP-to-VoIP and VoIP-to-TDM routing for softswitch and IMS networks.
Dynamic Quality of Service Management
As more and more carriers differentiate their international service based on quality, they require a robust solution which can ensure their partners are providing the highest level of service. Telarix's Dynamic Quality Management (DQM) is an integrated solution which provides unparalleled Quality of Service (QoS) awareness over TDM and next-generation voice routes, enabling service providers to automatically identify QoS issues and reroute traffic to the next routing option. By automating this labor intensive monitoring and routing process, DQM automatically identifies and manages all QoS issues 24x7, ensures SLA compliance and frees a carrier' s network personnel to focus on more value-added activities.