INCOMPAS Spring 2017 - Day 1 Show Daily

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THE INCOMPAS SHOW DAY 1
All too often nowadays, the idea that
carrier access billing standards (CABS)
are going away gets tossed around in
an almost factual way. But that’s not true. The
number of CABS bills that an exchange carrier
receives in any given month will either stay the
same or even grow. CABS is not going away, it’s
simply morphing into something different.
First, originating switched access remains.
Call types like outbound toll-free make up a
significant and growing percentage of most
carriers’ CABS compensable traffic. Even CABS
revenue for inbound calls, though incremen-
tally smaller due to the effects of intercarrier
compensation (ICC) reform, continues to have
the switched transport elements that will remain
compensable for the foreseeable future.
What about CABS and peering? Yes, carriers
are paying to terminate peer traffic simply for the
value of the direct connection, plus what they
can save in tandem transit delivering calls to
your customers. Circuits? Absolutely. Ethernet
is big business, especially metro Ethernet and
backhaul, and wireless carriers are pushing
back big time on LECs and CLECs who are not
sending CABS formatted bills for these products.
After all, the system your company uses to audit
bills accepts the CABS format, so why send
something inferior to your biggest customers?
But margin assurance is not just about the
CABS bills you send, or even the ones you
receive. Sure, they are important components,
but you have to know you’re billing everything
you can bill, getting paid for everything you do
bill, not paying for things you don’t owe or paying
too much for what you do owe.
Switched revenue and expense margin
controls depend largely on how you handle
your call records. Accurate and scalable CDR
mediation, or the process of capturing, reformat-
ting, rating, storing and indexing your call-detail
records, is a key margin assurance building
block. It’s a core process that voice telecom
providers of all varieties must deal with in the
normal course of business, now and in the
future, if for no other reason than to bill your
retail or wholesale customers. But mediation
accuracy not only has everything to do with your
network billing and cost margin assurance, it
also has far-reaching compliance implications:
CPNI, CALEA, FCC Form 480, business conti-
nuity, fraud management and more.
If your company is publicly traded, the
implications are even greater.
Now when it comes to circuit-based margin
assurance, beyond the installation charges
and MRCs on the CABS bills, there is another
unique set of margin assurance black holes,
and a good CABS vendor and system go along
towards filling them. Why? Well first take a
look at order flow. A metro Ethernet or fiber-to-
the-tower order should flow no differently than
The Future of CABS: Margin Assurance Needed
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(See CABS Story, page 6)
By Jon Jones