ACE*COMM Launches New Expanded Network Business Intelligence Suite

Presents new approach for telecommunications operators to spend less and make more

ACE*COMM recently launched its new, expanded Network Business Intelligence (NBI) suite of products and its underlying application platform that collects, correlates, and transforms disparate data into actionable business information for operators to increase revenues, improve operating margins, and enhance utilization of network assets.

According to industry estimates, operators may be losing from 3% to 15% of their revenues from leakage, which represents up to $140 billion annually. Our NBI solutions have already successfully reclaimed $170 million per year in untapped subscriber revenues for one European Tier-1 carrier, and uncovered $41 million in unused network capacity for another UK carrier.

“Many OSS initiatives fail to produce the claimed returns, which is why so many operators continue to patch their legacy systems year after year,” said Chris Couch, ACE*COMM's Senior Vice-President and Chief Marketing Officer. “We have developed a comprehensive platform which can be tailored according to each operators’ particular environment and can provide detailed descriptions of how return-on-investment (ROI) is achieved. Most importantly, the NBI suite identifies how this intelligence can be translated into action and actual financial gain for the operator.”

The ACE*COMM NBI suite collects and integrates network data with other sources such as customer and service data to provide a comprehensive view of an operator’s business. This information can be used, for example, to identify discrepancies between the network and the billing system – resulting in the identification of revenue opportunities and avoidance of unnecessary capital expenditure. It also identifies how specific network assets are being used, identifying assets or even specific ports on switches that may be underutilized, enabling the operator to re-allocate resources more efficiently.

ACE*COMM’s NBI network and market visualization applications allow operators to tailor marketing activities based on available capacity, and understand customer demographics to improve product promotion effectiveness. They also enable operators to identify where new infrastructure should be installed based on density of target customers and remaining capacity.

Availability

ACE*COMM’s NBI suite is available now, with multiple Tier 1 and 2 operators already earning returns from deploying the platform. For more information, contact: .

Survey Results: Kids' Phone Use Unsupervised

A recent survey indicates that most North American teenagers who have mobile phones enjoy them with no parental supervision. A third of those surveyed use their mobiles to text-message friends during school hours, and almost a third play phone-based video games while in school. The survey, conducted by Itracks for ACE*COMM, also revealed that on average, teens spend almost as much time on their mobile phones as they spend doing physical activity.

Parents, it seems, are caught in a struggle. On the one hand, they want to provide mobile phones to their kids for reasons of security and convenience, but they are also reluctant to do so because of concerns for how those phones will be used. They worry about excessive overage, but are also concerned about inappropriate use. 

A survey by iGillottResearch, a market strategy consultancy focused on the wireless and mobile industry, found thatnearly two thirds of parents said they had concerns about giving a mobile phone to their under-12 children. Although the market for teen and "tween" mobile phones is growing, these parental concerns weigh heavily on that growth.

"Many of those concerns can be addressed by enabling parents to control and monitor their child's wireless usage," says Iain Gillott, of iGillottResearch. "For the mobile operators to successfully market mobile services to kids, we believe that the parents will have to be involved in their child's wireless experience."

A few solutions currently exist, such as specialized limited-used handsets. However, these units have limited appeal. "You won’t catch a teenager carrying a Mickey Mouse phone,” says Chris Couch, Chief Marketing Officer for ACE*COMM. “Nor can these phones restrict the time of day when the phone is used."

ACE*COMM recently launched Parent Patrol™ to address these concerns. As well as allowing parents to limit the amount of minutes or number of text messages that their child can use, they can also determine when the phone can be used. Parent Patrol™ can be used with virtually any mobile phone and the limits are easy to modify so parents can loosen the rules during summer holidays, for example, and tighten them during exam times.

About Parent Patrol™

Parent Patrol™ from ACE*COMM lets parents define limitations and restrictions on the mobile phones included in their family plan service bundle. For example, they can limit their child’s mobile usage to specific hours – such as between 8:00 AM and 8:00 PM. Or they can block text messaging (SMS) during school hours. In all cases they can program exceptions, such as calls to or from parents. Calls to emergency services are never blocked. For additional information, contact .

Industry News & Trends

Carriers Losing Billions

A recently published report by research firm Analysys revealed that global telecoms operators are losing an estimated 11.6 per cent of turnover ($170 billion) through fraud and other types of revenue leakage in 2005, compared to 10.7 per cent in 2004.

The Operator Attitudes to Revenue Assurance 2005 report surveyed over 100 operators from different regions of the world to investigate levels of revenue loss. The major sources of revenue loss continue to be fraud, credit management, least-cost-routing errors, interconnect/partner-payment errors, and poor processes and systems. The report reveals that fraudulent activity, in particular, has risen since last year and is now the single largest area of revenue leakage (2.7 per cent).

Other findings reveal that fixed-line operators continue to lose less than their mobile counterparts and once again there were strong regional differences. Operators in North America, Central and Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, in particular, suffered from more revenue leakage than the global average. However, the report did reveal the importance of revenue assurance is continuing to grow, with over 60 per cent of respondents believing revenue assurance to be more important than in previous years.

Danny Dicks, principal analyst at Analysys, said: "This is the fourth year we have carried out the research and it is clear that operators are becoming more realistic about loss levels. Consequently, many operators now have dedicated revenue-assurance teams and are investing in external help, in order to reduce losses."

OSS Complexity May Delay Triple Play Deployment at Large U.S.Carriers

Bethesda, September 6, 2005 - According to a newly released Dittberner Associates research study, OSS Systems for Triple Play Services, operational support system (OSS) problems may delay the deployment of triple play services by large U.S.carriers such as BellSouth and SBC.

Dittberner’s report cites certain service activation, trouble management, and service assurance issues that need to be ironed out before carriers can profitably deploy triple play to mass markets.

“Triple play is set to deploy in a matter of months, but the OSS systems that need to support them are still in R&D mode,” says Dan Baker, research director of Dittberner’s OSS/BSS KnowledgeBase™. “It’s a divide and conquer strategy. No OSS vendor can deliver a complete solution, so the carriers are divvying out portions of the problem to their trusted OSS suppliers. However, considerable synchronization and testing will be needed to glue all those pieces into a system that’s sufficiently bulletproof,” Baker adds.

Among the tough triple play OSS issues Dittberner’s report cites are:

Quality of Service and Trouble Management: Traditional fault and performance management systems monitor network devices via alarms and thresholds. As it happens, IP services layered on top of many network elements and third party supplied components, complicate the correlations required to understand QoS or quickly respond to trouble.

Service Activation: Deploying sophisticated IP and triple play services requires highly flexible and accurate service activation systems that understand the dependencies and subtle nuances of hundreds of versions of network devices.

Build vs. Buy: Carriers are still torn over whether to “build” or “buy” their OSS capabilities. On this score, Dittberner’s report sees the market divided into two camps today: carriers such as Verizon who favor building triple play OSS capabilities in-house and carriers like SBC, who are committed to buying from COTS vendors.

Interconnect Assurance: Carriers need to be far more aware of network capacity and quality issues as they expose their infrastructure to other operators as in the case of a third party service provider hosting a game server that requires the incumbent LEC to deliver a high QoS connection to the end user.

Video Set Top Monitoring: Carriers must not only monitor network quality, but also service quality at the customer’s home, hence the OSS must be smart enough to retrieve and analyze QoS reports from millions of residential set-top boxes.

Network Inventory: In recent years, large carriers have toyed with the idea of centralizing provisioning information in an inventory system. However, the IP network is so dynamic that it’s hard to maintain accuracy. Consequently, carriers are now exploring ways to marry provisioning and inventory systems with telecom discovery tools.

Details on how large carriers are deploying OSS for triple play services are contained in Dittberner’s recently published report: OSS Systems for Triple Play Services. For more information: www.Dittberner.com.