Track and Tame the Billing Beast

Sun partner XACCT enables a range of service providers to monitor their network traffic. With XACCT's N2B platform, providers get a bidirectional link between the network and the back-office business and operation support systems, such as rating, billing, customer relationship management, fraud detection, and traffic engineering applications.

Like many of the devices that fill our lives today, cell phones do much more than simply allow us to make calls from anywhere. Many wireless users are signing up for products and services that can be delivered via mobile devices, including short message service (SMS), multimedia messaging service (MMS), mobile commerce, and e-mail. But monitoring and billing for such services has long been an obstacle for service providers.

Enter XACCT Technologies. With its Network-to-Business (N2B) Platform, XACCT enables a range of service providers — phone companies, wireless and cable operators, ISPs, and managed service providers — to monetize their network traffic. And by providing comprehensive and granular information about usage on the network, N2B enables service providers to bill customers accurately.

Taming Complexity

"Tracking and billing customer activities was a relatively straightforward matter in the world of voice communications," says Anil Uberoi, senior vice president of product marketing and business development at XACCT. "That's because activity was measured in minutes and a switch produced all the necessary billing information. In the data world, however, there is no single unit of measure, because now we have Web sessions, movie downloads, game downloads, SMS, and e-mail. Plus, there is no equivalent of a single, class-5 voice switch."

Instead, in IP networks three types of network and service elements are involved in service delivery: the transmission elements (such as routers, switches, and hubs), the network management elements (such as DHCP, RADIUS, and DNS servers), and the application servers (e-mail, FTP, games, and ring tones). As a result, billing for data services requires providers to gather, correlate, and synthesize the information from several disparate systems to extract a billing record — a highly complex undertaking.

But with XACCT's N2B platform, providers get a bidirectional link between the network and the back-office business and operation support systems, such as rating, billing, customer relationship management (CRM), fraud detection, and traffic engineering applications. XACCT extracts usage and billing information from all three types of network elements, synthesizes that data, and then processes it for use by the various downstream applications.

For service providers, such a platform can yield big returns, particularly in terms of offering new, innovative services and reducing customer churn, says Uberoi. "Once a service provider understands which five data services you're using most frequently, the provider can then personalize these offerings for you, offering you special promotions or discounts. And this contributes to long-term customer retention far more than, say, flat, monthly rates or random service bundles."

Successful Rollouts

To date, XACCT has 75 major customers worldwide, including Sprint PCS, Bell Canada, SBC Communications, and Telecom Italia. And many of its customers have already reaped substantial benefits.

After purchasing XACCT's platform, one major carrier was finally able to bill its customers for MMS within 90 days of installing the software. The carrier didn't offer the service previously because it had no easy or reliable way to distinguish among services and bill accordingly. For instance, it couldn't tell the difference between video and still images. XACCT N2B solved that problem.

A major cable operator used N2B to track usage on its network, and found that 2.2 percent of its customers were using more than 40 percent of the total bandwidth, causing a number of other customers to complain about slow service during peak hours.

"To discourage this service abuse," Uberoi says, "the carrier located those (heavy-usage) customers and offered them continued services—but only at a substantially higher price. Predictably, many of those customers found other carriers, freeing up the bandwidth for the remaining 95 percent of the company's customers. This was a major boon, both to the carrier and its customers."