Intelligent tariffication

The current situation, when some telecoms operators switch over to service tariffication according to the "flat-rate" principle (unlimited traffic volume for flat rate per month), we witness the process of imminent revenue drop (ARPU), because the main competition instrument with such a model is supply price. In order to attract more new customers, operators have to continue decreasing costs of their offers, which imminently sets the "flywheel" of damping spinning, which stymies commercial development of the operator, making further provision of services unprofitable.

Inline Telecom Solutions sees the possibility to solve this task in significant improvement of service management flexibility and creation of new flexible tariff plans and services, which in turn imposes new requirements on the network infrastructure, as well as to billing of a telecoms operator.

Inline Telecom Solutions offers "Intelligent tariffication" solution based on B&CC Billmaster, which gives to telecoms operators a unique possibility to satisfy individual requirements of subscribers in return for a simple provision of broadband access to services. The basis of "intelligent tariffication" consists in multi-criteria subscribers identification, application of service policies and tariffication of subscribers according to actual use of services.

Realization of solution

"Intelligent tariffication" gives the possibility to multiservice telecoms operators to provide and account services, using a unified billing solution. These can be services of wire (xDSL, Ethernet) and wireless (WiFi, WiMax) access to the Internet, voice services over the IP-protocol (VoIP), access to multimedia content, etc.

Provision and tariffication of these services can be done using advance scheme (prepaid) where authorization and tariffication of subscribers happens over the RADIUS protocol using the Cisco ISG functional. This functional is enriched by usage of Cisco SCE (Service Control Engine), which allows to realize control of traffic content more accurately (for example, the so called "parental control") up to the 7th level of network model (OSI), prioritizing of traffic for applications of subscribers (Torrents, Video, etc.), detection/blocking of viruses and DoS-attacks, etc.

Realization of such possibilities is ensured by "deep" integration of the billing system Billmaster with solutions of Cisco Systems, which are used for service management and provision of individual services to subscribers:

• Cisco Intelligent Service Gateway (ISG) – technology, which allows to identify a subscriber according to many factors, it determines the type of traffic servicing and submits the information for tariffication to the billing system;
• Cisco Service Control Engine (SCE) – a network element, which analyses traffic, which passes through it, and differentiates this traffic according to different types, determines priorities, limits or assigns a guaranteed band.

Cisco ISG ensures decentralized determination of services based on local configuration of devices, as well as centralized one – with the use of the policy server. Combination of an open interface and flexibility of policy description allows to quickly realize services locally, and in case of mass implementation – use a centralized policy server.

An important peculiarity of ISG implementation – are variants of subscriber session identification. Cisco ISG can use different attributes to identify a session at all stages of its life cycle and create a composite identifier for each subscriber, which includes a set of attributes (MAC, DHCP Option 82, VLAN ID, NAS port, etc.), which can be easily changed.

The list of subscriber identification options gives the possibility to form a set of traffic processing policies, such as redirection of the stream, authentication, authorization, statistics gathering, establishing of priorities, band limitation, etc., allows to quickly implement subscriber’s needs, getting a competitive advantage due to flexibility and speed of service implementation.

Service Control Engine (SCE) supplements ISG, because it allows to identify and manage traffic flows.

Due to deep analysis of flows at the speed of up to several Gigabits per second, this solution gives an operator the possibility to identify, monitor and manage any service applications, including Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) and even SKYPE.

Advantages of the solution

Inline Telecom Solutions offers the "Intelligent Tariffication" solution, which allows to provide high-quality services, increase efficiency of business and improve competitive advantages due to high flexibility, reliability, scalability and wide functionality.

Operators, which use "Intelligent Tariffication", can offer to their subscribers truly innovative services, based on customer applications. Threat subscribers receive services at affordable rates, and operators get guaranteed revenue.

Usage of "Intelligent Tariffication" gives to operators the possibility to organize the following services:

• Broadband economy-service. Traditionally operators create economy broadband services for subscribers, who rarely use the network or want to decrease their expenses. With SCE an operator gets the possibility to create broadband services for traditional applications. Specialized applications are limited by speed, for example for Web- and mail-traffic there is guaranteed the band of 2 Mbit/s, and speed of such applications as peertopeer flows, VoIP or Video, does not exceed 64 Kbit/s.
• Service package for small and medium businesses. Companies – users of broadband services are ready to pay more for higher class of traffic servicing (in relation to the basic service). For example, a corporate customer can disable peer-to-peer or Xbox-applications and give preference to business applications, such as VPN or e-mail.
• Band on demand, depending on applications. Another function of SCE – assignment of an additional band to particular applications on demand, for example, to music or video broadcasts.

Another advantages of this solution are the following:

• flexibility and high performance, which ensure provision of high-quality services;
• quick launching of new interesting and competitive offers to subscribers;
• usage of the interactive authorization Portal BISA for self-servicing of subscribers;
• reliable and accurate tariffication of services provided;
• reduction of operating expenses due to use of the unified solution and the possibility to use only those functions, which are required;
• "seamless" integration with solutions of third-party developers’, recognized world leaders on the market of wireless telecommunications services.