SNET Service to Offload LNP Administration, Reporting

Posted: 05/2002

SNET Service to Offload LNP Administration, Reporting

By Peter Lambert

ANY JOB DRAWING ENERGY AND TIME away from the bottom line, the theory goes, bears consideration for outsourcing. With plans to add a hosted service order administration (SOA) offering to its package of outsourced services this summer, SNET Diversified Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of SBC Communications Inc., hopes many wireless and wireline carriers subscribe to that theory when it comes to federally mandated administration and reporting on customers who switch among them.

Bending the theory, however, SNET DG says outsourcing SOA may boost the bottom line of wireless carriers.

Built on its national wholesale signaling services, SNET DG already offers hosting and management of line information database (LIDB), customer name (CNAM), 800-number and home location gateway services, as well as outsourced number pooling administration and LIDB storage via a 150-million-record database.

Now, pending action by the FCC on a petition by Verizon Communications and other carriers to delay next November’s deadline for executing local number portability (LNP), the company says wireline and wireless carriers will benefit from its hosted SOA. That service will handle the administration and reporting requirements associated with
LNP.

Attached to LNP, the SOA requirements mandate a porting transaction be shared between the carrier losing and the carrier gaining a porting customer, and the forwarding of that record to one of the seven national porting administration clearinghouses (NPACs) in the

United States. SNET DG is proposing to host and manage administration. Pricing will be based only on completed transactions that have been passed through NPAC and downloaded to local service management system databases used to update carrier switches.

“We think the SOA service bureau will be a nice complement to our LNP gateway,” says Suzette Taylor, associate director of business development. “They can come to us for LNP, use our SS7 network to determine the terminating number, and then in the same place they can get the SOA service from us, leaving us to handle the communications between the trading partners.”

Mandated in the interest of consumer ease, LNP and SOA represent a set of tasks not expected to prove directly profitable. However, SNET says a smoothed out LNP/SOA process will prove a boon to somewhat stalled wireless subscriber growth.

“We would contend that, not only will a robust outsourced service aid carriers in putting energy elsewhere, but that wireless carriers will benefit from both portability and pooling,” Taylor says. “If a wireline consumer can retain the number known to all his family, friends and business contacts, more will make the move to wireless, gaining mobility while retaining that number.” She notes many analysts project 60 percent of wireless customers who churn will choose to port their numbers. About 30 percent of all wireless customers churn. Consequently, SNET DG says it is building “inter-species” functionality into the SOA offering to accommodate differing wireline and wireless business rules, data formats and timers, plus extensive querying capabilities to confirm and analyze customer porting transactions, as well as long-term, off-board historical archiving for reporting purposes.

“We’re anxiously awaiting the FCC [LNP] decision,” Taylor says. “Although another delay may be granted, we think the mandate will stand. And even if that proves wrong, we still can build a number of services like number pooling, and CLECs in particular have expressed interest in hosted local service and access service request administration.” 

SNET DG SOA Service Bureau
Source: SNET Diversified Group