Smart Billing/Management for Broadband Wireless ISPs

Smart Billing/Management
for Broadband Wireless ISPs

Broadband Wireless Business
By Robert Hoskins
June 2001

It would seem that one of the most challenging projects for a Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP) would be integrating the right combination of networking and radio frequency equipment into their network. While building out a network is always a test of endurance, I recently discovered another equally daunting task -- choosing a good billing/management system.

There are several wireless email news groups that discuss the technical aspects of building wireless networks. When users post questions about what levels of power, gain or decibel interference are acceptable for transmitting and receiving radio signals, there are always numerous experienced engineers waiting in the wings with helpful suggestions and possible solutions.

However, when someone asks for recommendations regarding a billing solution, the answers are rather scarce. Accordingly, I decided to investigate to see what software packages existed in the marketplace and what features and benefits a service provider should put on their list to evaluate.

Some in the industry say that the last thing that an ISP usually thinks about when building out a market is their billing/management system. In fact, in talking with a WISP executive the other day from a company with a handful of launched markets, we asked him what billing platform they were using. He said that they had not decided on a billing/management system yet.

That is interesting, especially since his company has announced an aggressive roll out for the coming year. How could they be rolling out markets without a solid billing system in place?

While talking with Robin Greenhagen, president of GreenSoft Solutions, he confirmed that he sees this on regular basis, especially among small- to mid-sized ISPs. Greenhagen said, “that many ISPs don’t see billing systems as mission critical systems. Whether or not it is evident to the customer, an ISP’s primary concern is usually technical support, with billing being a secondary concern.

Many times billing is still handled through manual paper processes revolving around flat-fee per-month billing cycles.”

Re-Enter Nightmare

When GreenSoft Solutions helped one of their customers implement a new billing system, they actually had to hire a team of data entry professionals to re-enter information stored in paper documentation into a billing database. It was a good thing that the company decided to move to a completely automated billing system, because GreenSoft’s gBill application found over 1,200 customers that had been on the network for more than a year, yet had never been billed. Multiply 1,200 customers times $40 a month for a year and you quickly can see the justification for moving to a very structured and integrated billing platform.

The first question for billing/management vendors was what business problems does a system really solve? We got a variety of answers. As mentioned earlier, after the initial investment of time and money, billing systems can save ISPs an enormous amount of money and help them collect it in a more timely manner.

“Moving from a paper-based billing system to an automated billing system such as NTPayMaster, which starts out at a $1,000, will pay for itself in less than a month,” said Dwight G. Jones, CEO of Imagen Technologies, Inc., based in Saltspring, British Columbia.

When moving to an automated billing system, many ISPs add web-based interfaces for customers to pay online with a credit card, make adjustments to their accounts and even order new services.

“Replacing a $50,000 system administrator that is answering account questions, adding or deleting product features or manually provisioning services with an automated system is definitely worth the investment, said Greenhagen of Greensoft. “According to a study that General Electric did a while back, it costs a company $8 per phone call for a customer representative to handle a customer call compared to just 45 cents for a web-based transaction. If only 30% of your customer base adopts the web interface, your company will save a ton of money.”

Greenhagen also added that, “replacing a paper-based invoicing system with a direct credit card billing approach also will save a ton of money and time spent trying to collect payments from customers.”

“The biggest advantage customers see right off the bat is more accurate billing,” agreed Shawn Hogan, president of Digital Point Solutions, based in San Diego, Calif.. “However our solution, OptiGold ISP, does much, much more than billing. We can also help an ISP develop systems to assist with new product introductions, technical support, provisioning, contact management, project management and even contract development work.”

Future Needs of Billing Platforms

According to a white paper from EHCP, billing platforms will have a much bigger role in creating online products, provisioning new network elements, activating and terminating customer accounts through web-based interfaces as well as automatic revenue sharing/collection systems that monitor other network and content provider’s billing platforms.

In the current broadband access market many people and businesses are primarily interested in getting a high-speed connection so that they can retrieve information much faster than with a dial-up connection or save money by deleting expensive T1’s from their monthly expenditures. However, as users become more and more accustomed to broadband connections, they are quickly discovering that moving beyond text-based content is now possible.

As a result many new multimedia services like music sharing, video streaming and gaming are becoming very popular. So popular that many ISPs have had to move from a flat-fee billing structure to a usage-based platform for certain customers because they use a tremendous amount of bandwidth.

In order to track and bill heavy users for these new types of content and usage patterns a billing system suddenly needs to provide more sophisticated tracking tools. Implementing better systems will also make it easier to create effective, highly automated processes for service delivery and revenue management.

Business users will also expect new applications to be supported such as Voice-over-IP (VoIP) and Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). A service provider’s billing system must be able to deal with multiple simultaneous billing events and different models for revenue sharing in the same billing environment. The accelerating number of services to charge for, as well as the number of parties and networks involved in delivering the services, will lead to some very high peak volumes of billable events needing to be managed by the ISP’s support system.

Processes That ISP Billing Systems Need To Accommodate

Service activation and provisioning systems must support a very complex chain of inter-linked processes ranging from inventory allocation to parallel activation in multiple network elements.

The service provider’s billing environment must be very flexible to capture diverse service characteristics, including Quality of Service (QoS), data volumes, application type and content value. Real-time consolidation and processing in mediation and rating layers will be needed to handle large volumes of data.

Customers require advanced presentation of their spending on services. In the short term, this implies user-friendly presentation of charges on their invoices and via web accessible interfaces. Currently billing information latency might range from minutes to hours. In the near future, customers will expect real-time account status presentation.

Key Service Delivery Processes

Ordering -- A key factor for operators and service providers is to be first to market with new and creative services. In order to sell new services, there has to be a way for customers to order and pay for services. Ordering systems should make it easy to define new services and service packages by combining access with content services from numerous content service providers. It must be possible to define different kinds of services and service packages in the same system.

The second important step of the ordering process is the pre-qualification of customers as they go through the sign up process. This is usually done through interaction with external order management and inventory systems.

Provisioning -- Several processes are needed when providing a new user with service. The first step is to provision the physical and logical layers in order to give the customer access to the wireless network as well as set their account up in the inventory system.

Once access is provisioned there are many other systems that might be involved in the sub-process, e.g. inventories, test, work management, connectivity management, activation, etc. All of the internal systems need to be tightly integrated with each other as well as seamlessly integrated with all outside vendors’, advertisers’ and content providers’ systems, which sometimes can be a challenging task.

Activation -- Activation is primarily about receiving activation requests from order management systems, translating them into network element commands and distributing these commands to network elements. When activation is carried out in the network, the billing system should also be notified. De-activation, modification and cancellation are usually supported in the same manner.

A single service activation system interfacing network elements in multiple network technologies will simplify the implementation of support for bundled services. For instance, a service package including high-speed Internet access plus one or several content services could then be handled via one activation request. In addition to simplifying the ordering process, using a system of this nature can significantly reduce cost for administration, operation, etc.

Once a system is in place, a service provider should be able to continuously introduce new products into a system that are easily updated to support new service logic and versions of network elements without operational disruptions.

Revenue Management -- The revenue management process starts with collecting usage data and event-based information from a variety of network elements and applications. All information needs to be processed and consolidated in different ways before it is transferred to the rating process. The main task for the rating process is to match usage data and events-based information with defined services, tariff plans and subscription information.

Mediation -- The mediation system in a billing solution needs to be a true multi-vendor/multi-technology media platform. It needs to mediate call and usage data from all kinds of equipment, including IP equipment.

There are two main types of mediation. One is collecting information from call data records (CDR) usually associated with voice calls and the other is tracking different types of content usage. Typically a CDR collects information from ATM and/or Class 5 switches that provide the billing system with statistics such as QoS delivered, duration, volume, caller ID, start and stop time, etc. The billing system uses this information to bill for voice over IP calls and can also be used to verify that a company’s SLA has been met.

In addition to voice calls, content mediation is applicable for all content and value-added services. Events are collected from gateways, routers, application servers, etc. Content mediation needs to collect usage data in real-time, process the data (i.e. aggregate and consolidate), then distribute it to a downstream system, or if required, to a network mediation system for further processing and aggregation. Content mediation systems need to support a number of network elements such as:

AAA servers running Radius or TACACS+
Web servers
Mail servers
Firewalls
LDAP servers
DNS
Routers/IP switches (using SNMP or netflow)

Rating -- Rating is used for calculating usage charges (e.g. traffic, content) and applying these charges to end-customers. Real-time rating can be done, where the rating process is “always-on” and can process record files immediately as they arrive. It should also includes batch programs, reading event records or Internet Protocol data records, entering the charge information automatically, for example, from a file containing information created in a network environment.

Invoicing -- The invoicing function of the billing process includes the production of invoices and the display of various kinds of invoice information. Features of currency conversion, tax and volume discount calculations should also be provided. After the rating application has performed the price calculation of charges, the charge information is stored in the database. The invoicing is performed as a batch process, using this data as input. Another nice option to look for is layout and distribution tools for flexible and efficient management of invoices and other customer documents.

In addition to evaluating the various modules and functionality of different software packages, you also need to look closely at the customer support that is provided after the sale. Among the list of companies researched for this article, one company stood out above the rest in this area. Digital Point Solutions provides an online list server that answers customers questions in almost real-time. No filling out a form or sending an email to support@anycompany.com in hopes that someone will get back to you. You can also search through their archives by key word to see if your question might have already been answered.

Digital Point’s executives monitor the news group religiously and add new functionality to their products based on what the customers ask for via this online newsgroup. When’s the last time you heard about a company that actually listened to its customers?

Digital Point is dedicated to adding new functionality very quickly. In fact, they have updated the product every other Friday for the last 5 years. Seems like there would be a catch, but there isn’t. Once you buy the product, upgrades and support are free for life. Updates add functionality, but aren’t mandatory so customers only have to upgrade when they see added features they want to add to their billing/management solution.

Another thing that impressed me was their offer to let you download their fully-loaded software for free. It will only allow you to add 100 customers, but the promotion seems to be enough to hook plenty of customers. The site has about 14 pages of customer testimonials that state, that once they began using the product there was no turning back. Ask their customers on their news group and you’ll get a quick confirmation that this isn’t just marketing hype.

As broadband wireless ISPs evolve, so will their billing systems. Users need to do a thorough analysis of their business needs and take great care in finding a solution that meets their requirements for flexibility, scalability and performance. Regardless of which system you chose, the chance of improving revenue streams is very likely.

About the Author: Robert Hoskins is an independent technology writer, specializing in broadband wireless topics. He can be reached at rhoskins@bbwexchange.com.

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