Industry Leader in Telecom Data Analytics and Revenue Assurance

Being in the software business for 20+ years, I’ve both feared and admired open-source.  On the one hand, we’ve benefited from it so thoroughly that it’s easy to overlook that we’re standing on ‘shoulders of giants’ every morning from the moment we boot up a Linux VM, to whatever PERL or Python module we’ll download or upgrade during the day.  We’ve made modest contributions along the way, but we’ve never taken the plunge of actually open-sourcing our own wares -- even though, economically and technically, our own customers have benefited from indirectly from them. After all, building our apps around open source has - over the long-term - kept our own customer’s total cost of ownership down, and kept openness and reliability up.  In this post, I’d like to explore an often-overlooked aspect of open-source:  it’s ability to help you close more sales by including an ‘infrastructure call option’ for your prospects.

Advanced Technologies & Services, Inc. and EGC International, Inc. have announced a Global partnership to expand their service offerings to Central and South America.

The partnership will allow the two companies to leverage their combined experience, business relationships, and technologies to expand business activities across Central and South America. It is expected that the partnership will generate new revenues for both companies and support growth plans in new geographies.

The Improving Rural Call Quality and Reliability Act of 2017 (“RCC Act”) was signed into law by President Trump on February 26, 2018.

The primary thrust of the Act was designed to focus attention on the quality and reliability of communication services provided to rural areas of the United States by entities referred to as Intermediate Providers.

*** Ken Babcock will be hosting a free webinar on the new rules and impacts of the Rural Call Completion order on Wednesday, May 23, 2018 at 1 PM EST.  Click Here to sign up for the webinar ***

Changes are here for Rural Call Completion reporting and compliance.  The good news is that the FCC has ruled in FCC18-45 that, effective immediately, Covered Providers no longer must submit FCC 480 – Rural Call Completion Reports to the FCC on a quarterly basis. Thus, the report that was due May 15, 2018 covering the 1^st Quarter, 2018 does not have to be submitted.

However, there are new and increased FCC regulations as spelled out in the Second Rural Completion Order that was published in the Federal Register on May 10, 2018 and that goes into effect on June 11, 2018.  Covered Providers, as defined in the previous Rural Call Completion Report regime, must now implement an internal contract management and monitoring process that is far more stringent than anything experienced previously.

In my last blog, I made what I consider to be a clear statement of what can be done and what will happen if we do not do something.  We need to face reality and meet it head on.

The first thought that comes to my mind is that we will need one world-wide database that will be populated with unique Geographic User Building Blocs (GUBBS).  Initially, the thought is to make the concept work within the existing North American Numbering Plan Area (NANPA) and if successful expand the idea to the rest of the world.

In the Trump era we have come to expect a decrease in telecom regulation but the deregulation policy hit a snag recently when the US National Security Council announced a plan that would result in the government building and owning a national 5G wireless network. 

5G networks are of great interest because of the speeds that the technology will make available and the security those networks offer.  The new speed capabilities gives the Internet of Things (IOT) a real push forward and in an age of increased hacking, 5G will be a welcomed technology.

Cloud storage has been around since the 1960s, but it’s only in recent years that we’re beginning to understand and deploy the technology to its full potential. For telcos coming to grips with the advantages of having access to big data, the cloud offers a range of benefits.

Cost Benefit

Cloud storage has become cheaper over the years, with giant providers like Google and Amazon able to leverage economies of scale and keep the market competitive. Since data sets are likely to get bigger as time goes by, managing the cost of storage is crucial to enable companies to remain competitive in their target markets. Using the cloud results in lower operating costs, reduced overheads, and lower hardware and maintenance expenses.

Recently, there has been a growing public buzz about the impact of making it possible for any telephone number user to keep his/her same telephone number regardless of where he/she moves within the United States.

From a purely technical perspective, especially in this world of IP-to-IP connectivity and wireless, there is nothing from a network operations perspective that would prevent such an occurrence.

However, as we all know, the devil is in the details.

For the last fifty years of my telecom experience, a person’s telephone number had geographical significance that was critical to proper rating and classification of calls placed from a telephone number.

The telephone number could easily be translated to a/an:

• Exchange Name
• Exchange Carrier
• Rate Center having specific Vertical and Horizontal coordinates that identified the exact physical location within the North American Numbering Plan Area
• LATA Code
• State Code

This type of structure historically promoted distance-sensitive rating structures for individual calls that carried labels like Local, intrastate toll and interstate toll. The structure often dictated things like when you were billed for telephone usage during a month.

The FCC is currently struggling mightily to arrive at a fair and equitable solution to the need to promote uniform quality of telecommunications for both large urban centers and very small rural areas of the United States.

The FCC fully recognizes that the existing Rural Call Completion reporting requirements are not capable of providing a reliable measurement of the “of how answer and call completion rates differed for various small non-rural carriers compared to the overall rate provided to larger non-rural carriers in total. “