20060321 VSWG Cabo Face to Face Minutes
From CDGWiki
Inaugural face to face meeting
Cabo San Lucas, Mexico
Sponsors: Iusacell and Huawei
March 21, 2006
Contents |
[edit] Participating companies
| Aicent | Nortel |
| Alltel | QUALCOMM |
| Bermuda Digital | SKT |
| CDG | Sprint Nextel |
| Cibernet | Syniverse |
| EOCG | Telus Mobility |
| Huawei | TNZ |
| Iusacell | Unefon |
| KDDI | US Cellular |
| Lucent NZ | Verizon Wireless |
| Maritime Communications | VeriSign |
| MiPhone | Vivo |
| Movilnet Venezuela | Vodafone |
Over 50 people participated in the 1st face to face Voice and SMS Working Group. Turnout was great and after taking a moment to get to know our colleagues better we had some great conversation focused on three of our top priorities: SMS white paper, coverage exchange and X0 to X2 CIBER record type migration.
[edit] Meeting Documents
The documents linked below are hosted on the CDG website. (login to CDG site may be required)
[edit] Discussion Topics
-
SMS white paper
- Owner: Daniel Salek of QUALCOMM
- SMS is a critical roaming feature but differences in requirements and implementations create implementation and billing challenges
- Action: Create a set of common requirements and recommendations for implementation and billing
- Draft SMS white paper released to carriers on Feb 21
- Some feedback has been received but more is needed
- Contact Daniel Salek to provide feedback or post to the wiki here
- VSWG team discussion and decisions:
- The white paper doc was discussed at the VSWG working session on 2006-03-21.
- Due to time constraints the focus was on the billing section, rather than potential signaling issues, which carriers have indicated are not having a major impact today.
- The consensus from the carriers who spoke at the meeting was that the "bill-and-keep" approach was not sufficient for international roaming. Thus we need to work on a way for the serving carrier to be recompensed for providing SMS to inbound roamers.
- In addition, carriers seemed to agree on the requirement for the home carrier to be able to identify the true serving carrier for an SMS roamer. This information can allow the correct charging to be applied to the subscriber's SMSs, so that the home carrier can recover the intercarrier charge, which may vary by serving carrier.
- The serving carrier identity can be provided to the home carrier either in the billing flow (e.g. in CIBER records) or in the signaling (e.g. in the SMDPP message for MO). CIBER mechanisms may already be available in some cases. However, a number of carriers expressed their preference to be able to identify the serving carrier based on the internetwork signaling instead (or perhaps as well?). This will allow the existing MC-based billing approach to be enhanced for "per-serve" charging.
- Next steps: Continuing the review of the white paper and determining how to provide required billing information. SMS will be discussed on the April 12th team conference call.
- Coverage Exchange
- Owner: Travis Lathrop of Sprint Nextel
- In order to maximize advertising and quality of service, maps must be exchanged between partners to indicate coverage areas. This is not consistently happening today. Money is wasted because of this.
- Action: Create a common format to exchange this information and a way to exchange it which is feasible for any size carrier, with or without a dedicated mapping group.
- Next Steps:
- Designate a mapping expert within your company to participate on this project. Send the mapping expert contact information to Travis
- A draft of format requirements will be created and presented to the team for review and input. The owner is Travis and the target date is April 4.
- Options for normalizing the mapping data are being explored
- Options for posting the data in a central repository are also being explored
- Retiring X0 CIBER record types and migrating to X2
- Owner: Gepsie Cox of Cibernet
- Over 30 carriers around the world still produce X0 type records which have recently been retired.
- Some carriers that have moved to X2 record types are not properly populating the fields
- The old record types do not provide a way to relay critical information such as is required to support number portability
- This causes significant issues which may result in the following:
- Billing the wrong customer
- Billing the wrong carrier
- Fraud flags when no fraud is happening
- Inability to bill anyone at all resulting in the loss of revenue
- Refusal to complete a roaming partner launch (due to above billing issues)
- Lack of information to provide the desired detail on a customer invoice
- Telus wants X2 record types because they are moving to WLNP as the US did a little while back so it is the preferred record type in both countries.
- Action: In late February Cibernet proposed a clearinghouse edit to reject X0 records. This is great news but only part of the solution. Feedback on this proposed edit should be provided directly to Gepsie Cox of Cibernet. A decision concerning the edit and the effect date will be made in mid-May.
- Next steps:
- Provide feedback to Gepsie by mid-May, preferably much earlier.
- Team members to provide comments to the document drafted by Cibernet.
- (3a) X2 record population
- Carriers moving from X0 to X2 need information on how to do this smoothly and properly to avoid impacts to revenue streams and to customer satisfaction.
- Action: Launch an education campaign on how to properly populate X2 records
- Draft of how to populate the MDN and MSID paper was released for review on March 16. Topics for inclusion in the paper are still being collected.
- Feedback on this document should be provided directly to Gepsie Cox of Cibernet and the VSWG distribution list.
- Feedback on this document received during the WG meeting included the following:
- Some of the comments received during the meeting were to add directions for populating the primary fields by switch vendor type. For example: For those using a Nortel/Lucent/Huawei switch populate field X with the following……
- Many Asian carriers may not be aware of the need to change or know how to make the change.
- The document needs more detail. It should explicitly state how to populate each field, why it is important to move to X2 record types and what may happen if the move is not made.
- Next Steps:
- Cibernet, clearing houses, carriers and the CDG agreed to work together to get the word out about this change.
- Training at the June IRT and regional training are both being discussed. Gepsie or Devora, can you provide the team with an update on this item?
- A test plan is being developed for consideration of the team. This is intended to be used between roaming partners when they move to producing X2 records. Yutaka Yagihashi of KDDI has agreed to create a list of requirements as a first draft for this billing test.
- In the mean time – Please tell your roaming partners when you start to produce X2 record types so they can be prepared for this change. It may be necessary for your partners to make adjustments in their own billing systems when this move is made so please give them time to do this. Billing surprises are bad!!
[edit] Feedback on how to improve the effectiveness of the team
- Narrow the scope of what we are trying to accomplish
- Limit the number of topics to 1 or 2 per conference call
- Publish the specific desired goals and required decisions in the meeting agenda so the correct subject matter experts (SMEs) can attend the calls
- Surveys are OK but provide ample time to respond to each survey. Limit the scope of the surveys to one general topic so it can be sent to the correct SME.
- If feedback isn’t received by a general email to the team exploder list begin targeted personal calls and emails to gather the information.
- Reminders of calls and due dates are welcomed by the team members.
- Extend the amount of time dedicated to the working group during the IRT conferences.
Main | About | Work Items | Whiteboard | Meetings | Documents
