Seamless Interconnection
Evolving gateways bridge the gap
by George Alto and Ian Carter

Telecommunication interconnection used to be relatively simple. A handful of monopoly carriers linked up with one or two of their neighbors to deliver calls, while giant offices full of content employees tallied the accounts and mailed out the bills. It was a functional, dependable and relatively static system, and it worked just fine, provided you never had to do anything more comp-licated than make a long-distance call.

But the days of easy interconnection are over. Evolving technologies have streamed into the marketplace. Customers are demanding better and cheaper services, and regulators around the world continue to open the door for a steady stream of aggressive new service providers.

Initially, doors were opened to the competitive interexchange carriers (IXC). Then came the competitive local exchange carriers (CLEC), the Internet service providers (ISP), the enhanced communications providers (ECP) and a veritable host of innovative niche service suppliers. Nowadays, tens of thousands of telecom competitors in North America strive to provide their eagerly waiting customers with newer, better and cheaper services of all kinds.

With this ever-expanding roster of carriers and services, the old issue of carrier-to-carrier interconnection is more important than ever before. In many cases, the success or failure of a carrier's business depends on the quality of interconnections they achieve and the integration they accomplish with their back-office operational support system (OSS).

It all comes down to information. In today's marketplace, carriers are vitally dependent on each other and their customers, for the critical information they need to deliver services and collect revenues. Although they may compete with each other, carriers must also be customers and partners with other carriers to succeed.

The sheer number of transactions needed to complete tasks is astounding. New local carriers need customer information, as well as facilities and services information from the incumbents; long-distance carriers need to purchase access from local service providers; and all carriers need to exchange information with each other to provision service requests, complete wholesale billing, network trouble diagnostics and referrals, and to manage customer accounts on an ongoing basis.

This complex and continuous exchange of information is made possible through the use of gateways that bridge the gap between carriers' networks, OSSs and customer data. A gateway is, by definition, any combination of hardware and software that allows electronic information or data to flow from one place to another. But today's gateways must be much more than a simple conduit for information.

In the current competitive environment where cost, customer care and speed of service are increasingly critical factors for business success, carriers need innovative gateway solutions to help them stay ahead of the pack and differentiate themselves.

Innovative gateway solutions

Carriers expect a lot from their gateways. They want one vendor to provide all the interconnection interfaces they require to all their trading partners. However, since most customers do not require all the interfaces at the same time, they are willing to partner with their vendors over time to get their mechanization in phases.

Today's dynamic customers want their gateway vendors to support

• Preordering
• Local service requests (LSR)
• Enhanced 911 (E911)
• Line information database (LIDB) updates to ILECs or equivalent carriers
• Access service requests (ASR), interfaces to all the ILECs and major IXCs
• Local number portability (LNP) interfaces to the regional number portability administrative centers (NPAC)
• Trouble administration (TA) interfaces to the ILECs and major IXCs.
• Wholesale and carrier billing interfaces
• Service Management System 800 (SMS/800) database update interfaces
• Proprietary interfaces to some of their strategic partners and vendors

To allow for the seamless interexchange of information, effective OSS gateway solutions share the following best practice features:

Full automation
Automation allows carriers to manage requests, provision circuits and deliver services with an absolute minimum of time lost to manual processing.

Reliability
OSS solutions must guarantee the delivery of transactions. The best products in today's market offer fault-tolerant configurations for outbound requests to ensure the delivery of every message and transaction, in addition to high availability on the incoming side for rapid data reception in mission-critical environments.

Bi-directional capability
Bi-directional capabilities allow the new breed of telecommunications companies to offer and/or buy wholesale services to/from other carriers. Today's telecommuni-cations companies are very dynamic and can change a business strategy on a dime. The need for gateway solutions to offer the support for this change is becoming commonplace.

Flexibility and configurability
Gateway solutions must be connection independent to enable data transmission by the method of choice. They must understand and permit the conversion of multiple languages and protocols. And they must allow carriers to cope quickly and effectively with evolving services, changing interfaces, and new trading partners, whether they are major customers, ILECs, CLECs, IXCs or ECPs.

A core platform
A core platform provides common services for all the interconnection interfaces it supports. Common services include transaction processing and control, security and access control, transaction and performance logging and reporting, data recovery and persistence, and reliability independent of interface type. Vendors that build on top of a core gateway are able to share these common services across all their interfaces and therefore able to build new interface types—standards based or proprietary—in shorter intervals.

Seamless integration
Seamless integration with back-office OSSs allows total information flow-through and automation of a carrier's complex business processes.

Integration with Back-office OSSs

A myriad of gateway solutions currently exist in the market today. Some of these are able to stand alone without an OSS, while others provide relatively open environments to integrate with other OSSs. Other vendors provide complete solutions to their customers: an OSS integrated with a gateway to provide end-to-end functionality and flow-through with carriers.

Several factors determine the level of integration that can be accomplished between an OSS and an interconnection gateway: the openness of the gateway, the functional capabilities of the gateway, and the functionality and openness of the OSS. Seamless integration with differentiating functionality can only be accomplished by vendors that provide both the OSS and gateway solution. Such integration allows for robust, feature-rich end-to-end flow-through.

The future of OSS and gateway integration relies on the following capabilities:

• The transparent management of service numbers (such as, telephone numbers, calling cards, and IP addresses) to provide services and LNP between carriers and organizations, such as NPACs and Internet Network Information Center (InterNIC), via LSR, primary interexchange carrier/customer account record exchange (PIC/CARE), and LNP interconnection interfaces
• The transparent management of network inventory when facilities are purchased and/or leased between carriers via LSR and ASR interconnection interfaces
• The automatic referral and/or acceptance of trouble tickets between carriers that share and/or lease network equipment and facilities via TA interfaces
• Provisioning and billing functions to transparently reconcile wholesale and carrier access billing information with actual customer-provisioned services and usage via wholesale billing and carrier-access billing (CABS) interfaces

No matter how open a gateway solution is, the vendors who succeed in the marketplace will be those providing integrated solutions. Winning vendors will be able to come up with functional and feature-rich gateways that are fully integrated to handle transactions between trading partners.

Gateways and E-commerce

Past interconnection relationships between carriers were, in effect, business-to-business E-commerce transactions: one carrier acted as the customer and the other carrier acted as the supplier. This relationship was not apparent, however, because carriers were restricted to ordering services from one supplier. The monopoly, however, is quickly eroding. Today's customers can order services from a choice of multiple carriers.

This new business climate creates new requirements for interconnection gateways. They must connect with numerous carriers with a variety of interfaces. To meet this need, gateway vendors must find a universal language to speak to these numerous systems.

XML, the E-commerce language in other industries, is gaining acceptance in the telecommunications industry. XML allows quick definition of an interface (for example, a purchase order), definition and validation of syntax and business rules, and exchange of information between carriers. These characteristics are well suited to the needs of the telecom business-to-business E-commerce industry. For this reason, more and more gateway vendors are adopting XML as their interface language-especially for the proprietary and strategic interfaces being used between carriers. As such, telecommunications industry standards organizations are beginning to consider adopting XML as the industry standard for gateways.

The future of the interconnection marketplace

Today's gateway vendors want their solutions to be modular and flexible to accommodate change—change in partners, protocols, interfaces, and joint interface agreements (JIA)—with no downtime and no impact on the gateway's core design. These changes have been, and will be, mainly driven by the incumbent carriers who have gateways interfacing with them. The vendors who establish the best relationships with these incumbents will win market share.

For the majority of vendors, such flexibility is not a problem. Most of the best new product developments of the last few years have been driven by specific customer needs, and vendors are generally more than willing to work closely with clients to define their requirements, implement their products and train their staff to stay ahead of the competition. This close relationship between vendors and carriers will likely create a stream of innovative solutions in the gateway market as carriers' requirements continue to evolve.

The emergence of service bureaus in the gateway market is a case in point. Customers interested in service bureaus want to be able to go to one place for all their interconnection needs and to interface with all their trading partners.

Three issues must be resolved before the service bureau concept can win wide-spread acceptance:

• Vendors must increase the number of incumbent carriers with whom their service bureaus can interface. At the moment, vendors offering service bureaus are primarily focused on the LSR and preordering interfaces of a few incumbent carriers.
• Service bureaus must be able to fulfill more than LSR transactions. They must process other transactions, such as ASR, PIC/CARE, E911, LIDB and TA.
• The business and regulatory climate must change. For a real service bureau to work and meet the needs of today's customers, the incumbent carriers, vendors, and larger customers must cooperate. Unfortunately, this cooperation is not happening in today's business and regulatory climate.

In the future, a variety of options will serve the interconnection needs of carriers. Some customers will not require the robust and seamless integration used to link an OSS and a gateway. These customers will be best suited to a service bureau model. Some customers will require seamless integration between their OSS and gateway, and they will go to the few vendors that offer it. Some customers will require seamless integration of their OSS and gateway for some services and not for others. This group will most likely implement a hybrid solution involving a service bureau for some interface types, and a gateway with seamless integration to the OSS for other services.

Gateways have come a long way in a short time. The increasing demands for new services that can be delivered more quickly and cheaply have made the need for seamless connection greater than ever before. Which technologies will be adopted and which technologies will fall by the wayside, remains to be seen. With so many possibilities, the end result is hard to predict.

From Current OSS, Spring 2000, Vol. 1, No. 3. Published by Eftia OSS Solutions.