Revenue Assurance

The inherent complexity of mobile operators’ business in highly competitive markets and the continuous evolution of services offered pose a constant challenge in assuring revenue integrity and billing accuracy. The massive use of mature services, and the intrinsic risk of the not-yetmatured ones require maximum care in timely detecting leakages that, if ignored, might quickly and significantly impact revenues.

Switching their strategic focus from customer acquisition to revenue and margin development, telecommunications operators in highly competitive mature markets are pressed to develop new services to retain their customer base while increasing revenue. Innovative offerings such as video call, push e-mail, integrated communication and other mobile office functionalities for business users have emerged. At the same time a strong monitoring process for operational cost control and compression is mandatory.

Furthermore regulatory and other governing requirements, impose stricter and more detailed controls over the revenue generation chain. To minimize revenue leakage and meet stringent regulatory requirements, operators should ensure constant monitoring on CDR generation and rating, leveraging a highly industrialized and agile solution to implement controls on their network and all their services since the earliest phase of their life cycle.

The revenue assurance challenge

Integrated End-To-End: testing & CDR/Rating verification solution

The ANTS for Revenue Assurance solution enables telecom operators to industrialize agile and robust revenue assurance operations integrating both end-to-end testing and CDR/Rating verification.

End-to-end testing controls whether a service use case generates the expected CDRs and is properly rated, according to the relevant charging cases and price plans. Pre-built or user-defined tests can be run over the air on a subset of network elements and user profiles (SIM/USIM). The scheduling and resource management engine seamlessly coordinates their execution across Remote Test Units (RTU) deployed throughout the network. In parallel, Remote Record Selectors (RRS) capture the data generated at various network/IS nodes so that it can be matched with the relevant charging cases and price plans.

CDR verification also controls CDR availability, integrity and accuracy on real traffic. From multiple points (network nodes, service platforms, mediation, etc.) across a network, RRSs capture the CDRs designated to be verified, check the user-defined verification rules and produce the related indicators, and filter the CDRs to be forwarded to ANTS Server for further analysis.

Massive Testing And Expertise Leverage

Many factors contribute to the exponential growth of the number of revenue assurance tests to be conducted, such as the number of service use-cases, price plans and user profiles, and the frequent network and service platform upgrades. At the same time, designing such tests requires in-depth expertise on the services and related charging rules.

To help operators to overcome this challenge, ANTS industrialization capabilities include:

Extensive process automation to enable massive testing, from the design of usecases, charging cases and verification rules to the production of Key Performance Indicators (KPI).
Virtual SIM Displacement technology allowing end-to-end testing executed over the air by RTUs while all test SIM/ USIMs remain centrally managed in SIM Archives - a must to efficiently cover all customer profiles on significant deployments.
Capitalization of experts’ knowledge through powerful editors that enable test use-cases and charging cases, as well as CDR verification rules and price plans, to be modeled and stored in an open Test Management Repository.

Agile Revenue Assurance

The time factor is critical for revenue assurance success:

Early leakage detection and diagnosis is available via automatically produced KPIs and alarms when thresholds are crossed, enabling managers and operators to prevent (with nonregression testing, for example) or identify immediately the leakage issue. Interactive exploratory OLAP analysis, detailed end-to-end test traces and ad-hoc testing then provide assistance and accelerate the diagnosis and resolution.
Rapid integration of new services – prebuilt libraries of end-to-end service use cases and KPIs providing extensive service coverage including Voice, SMS, video, WAP/HTML navigation, contents download/streaming and IVR/VAS on all networks (GSM, GPRS, Edge, UMTS, 4G+, 5G, PSTN, ISDN, LAN, WiFi, etc.) can be easily expanded by users with ANTS powerful graphical editors to ensure a “zero-hole” revenue assurance. New functionalities available for VoLTE, VoWifi, RCS, ViLTE and 5G.

Multidimensional Counters

CDRs contain a reach set of information suitable for several type of analysis: fraud detection, network usage, network failures, marketing strategic decisions based on real customer data.Users can autonomously create a multidimensional storage, selecting the CDR fields, for reporting, analysis, and dashboard.

Examples of counter usage are: