| PRODUCTS – Automated Routing Management |
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Overview
Switched access and wholesale interconnection costs represent a dominant expense
for carriers today, in an environment where costs must be vigorously managed
to remain competitive in the marketplace. For both VoIP and traditional networks,
very complex routing schemes are needed to avoid overpaying for call completion
charges and to ensure you’re not leaving money on the table with your interconnection
partners. The decision to maintain network routing by hand is a deliberate
trade off of substantial savings in favor of simplistic routing schemes that
rely on processing less data, infrequent changes, and less
routing precision.
The SSI Universal Routing Solution (URS) automates routing management and enables a carrier to take advantage of new, more sophisticated routing schemes resulting in significant cost savings shown to produce a return on investment in months, not years.
URS delivers on cost savings based on a number of factors:
- Greater routing precision to take advantage of the most granular rate breakdowns off ered by wholesale carriers
- Addition of new carriers into routing to take advantage of new bilateral agreements and refi nement of rates to continually improve cost.
- Improved ability to process routing inputs in shorter cycle times so that changes impacting cost can be addressed as soon as they come due, resulting in added savings.
- Synchronization of the network based on constantly changing conditions which affect routing: wholesale carrier rate deck updates, trunk additions and deletions, LERG updates, non-LERG-conforming bi-lateral interconnect agreements, carriers merging network assets, tariff updates and key performance indicators, etc.
- Management of separate routing schemes for each of the various call jurisdictions, such as Local Calling Area, Inter/Intra LATA, Inter/Intra State, National, International and whether VOIP or TDM originated, and their respective wholesale carrier or tariff rates
- Centralized management of routing to assess the impact of changes on the network holistically, to ensure one routing change does not invalidate the affect of another.
- Leverage of multiple bilateral routing schemes such as alternative tandem homing and bill & keep arrangements
- For North American Numbering Plan routing, guaranteed up-to-date LERG conformance
- Ability to route based on a wide variety of criteria and enforcement of routing rules, including VoIP-peering, cable, wireless, aggregator interconnections
- Ability to audit and selectively restore out-of-process routing changes made to the network, to prevent network events from undoing routing optimization.
The savings generated by URS impact margins directly and allow carriers to price their services more competitively
URS Routing Schemes
As deployment of VoIP simplifies a service provider’s network infrastructure, the telecom interconnection landscape grows increasingly complex. As a carrier, it is absolutely essential to support a broad menu of different retail and wholesale products which are based on network handoffs along an ever changing continuum of cost and quality. Not doing so places you at risk of being marginalized on price.
The ability to design and implement complex network routing schemes is the core enabler.
By managing the design and implementation of multiple routing domains, URS enforcement of many rule sets can be achieved at the same time, and network updates can be done as often as needed, in very short cycle times and with repeatable quality.
- Jurisdictional
- VoIP
- FG-D
- Recip Comp
- Bill and Keep
- Wholesale Least Cost
- Bilateral Routing Agreements
- Selective Egress for least cost use of network resources
- Overflow Detection/Load Balancing for “best-odds” of first route choice
- Termination types:
- Peering
- Aggregation
- Traditional
- Custom
- Screening Management
URS Routing Rules
In order to realize cost reductions, network routing needs to be defined in enough detail to take best advantage of potential savings. To accomplish this, network routing complexity is increased based on a number of factors making automation essential to manage the process. The following table illustrates the factors that have traditionally been viewed as causing the most complexity, and describes how the URS platform addresses these issues.
| HOW MANY DIGITS TO TRANSLATE? |
Wholesale carrier prices come in many different formats
and break downs. Rate changes can be specifi ed in the following formats:
URS normalizes pricing to the most granular level. URS then uses the most cost effective pricing for each code in the dial plan to generate the best possible routing optimized for savings. |
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| HOW TO ROUTE DIFFERENTLY TO MULTIPLE CALL JURISDICTIONS? | Call jurisdictions are implemented using URS routing domains. Separate routing domains are confi gured, one for each relevant call jurisdiction, e.g. Local Calling Area, Inter/Intra LATA, Inter/Intra State, National, International. URS automatically applies the right prices and rules to the appropriate call jurisdiction for route version generation. | ||||||
| HOW MANY CARRIERS TO USE? | URS can manage routing to a multitude of carriers, each providing rates in different formats and serving different coverage areas. This enables a service provider to add new carriers to routing easily, to quickly take advantage of new bilateral agreements. | ||||||
| HOW TO PROVIDE SEPARATE ROUTING FOR IP ORIGINATIONS? | URS uses routing domains to implement VoIP and apply different routing rules for IP originations versus non-IP originations. | ||||||
| HOW TO ENSURE INTERCONNECT TRUNK ELIGIBILITY? | Rule-based trunk eligibility is enforced by NPA-NXX, refl ective of what is agreed to bilaterally. Each routing domain embodies rules that defi ne the trunk types eligible to carry traffi c. For example, SIP routes are eligible in IP domains, but may not be eligible in TDM domains. | ||||||
| HOW TO REFLECT KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS? | URS can promote or demote routes based on changing conditions, such as capacity or quality (KPIs such as ALOC, MOS, or ASR). |
The objective of routing is to find the lowest cost, eligible route that a call can take at that particular moment. URS determines which routes are lowest cost by importing pricing data, normalizing and pre-processing it for use by routing rules.
Determining which routes are “eligible” to carry which calls can be very complicated. Route eligibility rules are composed of:
- Trunk group characteristics (e.g. type, far end, interconnect partner, etc.)
- Call characteristics (e.g. jurisdiction, destination address, call type, etc.)
- Business artifacts (regulatory, industry routing guides, etc.)
- Wholesale carrier restrictions on interconnection to alleviate congestion or to manage growth
Violations of these rules can result in increased cost structures, or potentially blocked calls.
URS provides a rich set of capabilities for dealing with all the exceptions. Expressing these exceptions as rules allows for recalculation without manual intervention.
- Configurable rules-based capability for Tandem selection
- Direct specification of regional egress routes based on code ownership
- Specific digit-to-destination rules with or without system calculated overflow
- Suppression of overflow such as for native codes
- Screening based on abstractions like LATA, Rate Area, or Operating Company Number