Interconnect Offering Through Managed Services

The customer is a wholesale carrier based in the US, which specializes in direct routes in the Middle East and North Africa. Mirage offers wholesale termination to carriers worldwide. While small carriers work with a credit limit assigned by Mirage, their traffic is monitored and rated in real-time.

The requirement

The client needed a managed services offering for its wholesale carrier billing and settlement needs. It required a real-time credit monitoring solution that would enable it to “shut down” the carriers that had exhausted the credit limit or reached a threshold. The client needed a solution that would integrate with its Cisco powered network and Soft switch from Mera Systems. It was on the look out for a product that would enable the carriers hooked to its network to carry their global traffic and terminate it for them at competitive international rates.

The client required a product/tool that would help it to:

• Avail of managed services
• Provide timely reporting
• Perform billing and settlement for carriers
• Shut down carriers that were out of credit
• Operate on a pay-per-use model

The solution

Infozech’s solution was geared up to allow the interaction and client’s relationship management with its carriers on a daily/weekly basis. Typically, carriers were buying a credit line against a deposit to send a certain volume of traffic to the client network. Infozech focused on an offering that would monitor such traffic flow. It strategically decided to offer a solution that would need a low initial investment and scale up as the traffic volumes increased. Recognizing the fact that the client was expecting to ramp up rapidly, Infozech picked a product from its portfolio that would provide a complete outsourced managed services solution to Mirage.

Infozech deployed its Inter-Carrier Settlement—i-CAS solution—that is a key component of revenue management. The product provided automated functions such as contract management, bill calculation and cost assurance with the client's partners. i-CAS provided the functionalities of authorization, authentication and accounting through the Radius server. It controlled the flow between the payment request by the customer, payment processing for multiple modes such as credit card, debit card, check, wire transfer etc by providing integration with payment gateways, clearinghouses and financial institutions.

Infozech’s platform was integrated with the client’s MVTS Soft switch to provide real-time prepaid carrier tier down/shut down, using Radius.

The solution ensured that there was no revenue leakage because of its capability of monitoring the prepaid session in real-time and immediately updating the user’s account balance at the termination of a session. When the credit line was exhausted, i-CAS barred traffic from carriers from entering the Mirage network. It further recorded the payments received from its carriers in real-time and updated their available credits simultaneously during the session of the call.

The telecom services major not only provided the client with a billing system as a hosted application, it also assigned a billing specialist to operate and maintain the system as a part of the fully managed services solution.

The support staff was fully qualified and monitored the client’s systems 365x24x7, to ensure high availability and real-time trouble shooting. The specialist, based in India, helped provide on-line reporting, billing, rate plans management, customer self care and handled other back office tasks. The solution was hosted at a high availability data center in India that was remotely connected to the client’s switching center in the USA.

The benefits

• The client derived significant benefits from Infozech’s i-CAS product, which enabled the operator to greatly improve its internal efficiencies and scale business from scratch by large magnitudes.
• It helped it achieve the following:
• Grow its business (traffic volume) by 500 percent in a three month time-frame
• Increase the number of carriers hooked to its network from one to 11 during this period
• Infozech’s servers authenticated each call going through the network in under 50 milliseconds.
• Access a product that scaled with its requirements in real-time to meet the rampant growth achieved by the client
• Avail of an interconnect carrier solution as a hosted application
• Achieve rapid RoI (Return on Investment), with the investment paying for itself several times over in the three-month phase
• Quickly implement the system (which was up and running within four weeks)
• Achieve high availability and redundancy
• Access Infozech’s managed services solution and support
• Simplify the processes of rates/code management
• Automate its billing and credit monitoring system for carriers
• Achieve significant time saving and cost benefits across its business
• Ensure that service uptime was maintained and there was no loss of business
• Avail of billing support from a specialist based in India, that was a fraction of the cost of what it would have paid in the US
• Receive an end-to-end business management solution at its door step
• Ensure complete revenue assurance for its carriers