Reviewing Contracts for Content and Approval

Frequently contracts for adding products, services and for changing service providers must be processed. The ability to read, understand and negotiate such contracts is essential to becoming an effective manager.

First, it is absolutely necessary to become comfortable reading contracts and understanding their meaning. Certainly contract language is not the same as that which one might use with friends or family. And it’s hardly typical of many office conversations either. But it is what it is, so just get over it. Many of the commonly used terms and phrases in contract law are the result of years of accumulated court decisions and previous contract experience. These days many contracts are the Frankensteinian products of unbridled copy and paste. (Try comparing your various roaming agreements for similarities.) Continue reading “Reviewing Contracts for Content and Approval”

How does Mobile Broadband work?

Today’s web is full of articles and discussion about Mobile Broadband. We like to read Om Malik, whose crew of subject matter experts frequently add value on the topic. But what exactly is Mobile Broadband? How do wireless operators provide it? What makes it fast? Or slow? We’ve implemented stat-of-the-art 3G Mobile Broadband for a tier 3 regional CDMA operator in the US, and we’ll be providing insight into how this fiendishly complicated technology works, and what, if anything, you might do to improve your experience. Continue reading “How does Mobile Broadband work?”

Method of Procedure for adding IP Pools to the Starent PDSN Wireless

We recently had an opportunity to add an IP Pool to the Starent 16000 PDSN in our Nortel CDMA network. It is standard procedure that any network activity that has the potential to impact service must be performed during a low traffic period, (aka “the maintenance window”) and must be accompanied by a written method of Procedure (“MOP”.) Writing a MOP is not a very exciting activity, and in fact, takes a significant effort to get right. However, on the few occasions when the procedure went sideways, a well-written MOP was handy for resolving the issue, and in the worst cases, keeping us out of trouble in the post-mortem that followed.

Procedures that are frequently done benefit from a MOP by serving as a guideline for new engineers. Infrequently done procedures benefit by having a detailed reminder of what to, and not, do.

Read on for those details. Continue reading “Method of Procedure for adding IP Pools to the Starent PDSN Wireless”

Increasing Throughput on SMPP Links

We recently began using what we call an SMS Push application.  SMS Push allows us to send Text Messages to our subscribers in bulk.  Typically these messages are some Marketing promotion or a Customer Service announcement. The message text and a list of MDNs is provided to the application and it sends them serially, one at a time.  We wanted to speed that up.

The SMS Push application was provided by Quantum System Integrators in Costa Mesa, CA.  We’ve worked with them on several projects before and they’ve always high quality software and services with excellent customer support.  The application runs on Sun Solaris and is started from the shell command line.  It sends a predetermined messages to each MDN in a list provided as a command-line argument.  The application spawns a single instance of itself and sends the messages.  Through-put has been about 1 message per second, using an SMPP link to our Primal Technologies SMS-C. Continue reading “Increasing Throughput on SMPP Links”

PDSN packet inspection

Today Nortel presented their solution for monitoring and billing high bandwidth users of the wireless broadband network.  Software running directly in the Starent PDSN  basically uses deep packet inspection to implement traffic shaping.  The product is called Enhanced Charging Services (ECS) and it claims to provide integrated content-based billing.  The solution as presently sold might not truly be called “deep” packet inspection.  It only looks as deeply as layer 4, TCP and UDP packets.
Continue reading “PDSN packet inspection”

Least Cost Routing is harder than it looks

All voice network operators are continually looking for ways to cut the cost of delivering outgoing long distance calls. The best way to do this is to use 2 or more Inter-Exchange Carriers (IEC, in FCC-speak) or what you and I might call “long distance service providers,” and cherry pick the cheaper provider for each dialed destination. This approach is called “Least Cost Routing.” Seems simple, right? Well, it’s not, really.

First there is the tyranny of numbers. A Least Cost Routing application typically will use the Local Exchange Routing Guide (LERG) to determine all possible dialed destinations. The LERG defines roughly 450,000 destinations. For each destination you might have a cost proposal from several IEC. We tried evaluating 8 IEC.

Continue reading “Least Cost Routing is harder than it looks”

Traffic Pumpers Filling Long Distance Pipes

Starting late last year our long-distance network has been overwhelmed with calls to various for-free services. These services often appear to be the proverbial free lunch, with no apparent business model because the service is 100% free to the end user. Typical offerings include free conference calls or voice chat rooms. These services can completely destroy a flat-rate all-you-can-eat telephony service provider.

Continue reading “Traffic Pumpers Filling Long Distance Pipes”

The European Commission vs. Qualcomm

The European Commission has launched a case against Qualcomm for the way they license their technology to other companies. Cellular-News has the story, among others. I first caught wind of it over at Howard Chu’s HowardForums. My post there was a bit of a knee jerk reaction. Since that post I’ve done a little more reading and I have to say that my opinion is unchanged, though I also have a better understanding of why the EC is after them. Continue reading “The European Commission vs. Qualcomm”

This Week it’s Verizon Battling Google

OM Malik is one of my favorite bloggers. He generally writes about the technology industry with a focus on telecoms and the Internet. Today he covered news of Verizon Wireless and Google jockeying for position prior to the American 700 MHz spectrum auctions coming in January. It’s clear that both sides believe that much is on the line.

From Verizon Wireless’ perspective they must have at least 2 objectives in winning the auction. First, to acquire more spectrum to expand their existing business. They’d prefer additional nationwide spectrum. But I’d expect them to hedge that bet by selectively bidding for regional licenses.

Second, they can hope to eliminate a competitor, or at least reduce the scope across which a competitor might compete with Verizon Wireless. Both are clearly worth billions. Trailing 12 month revenue for Verizon Wireless is $91 billion. If a competitor or competitors could deny Verizon Wireless as little as 10 percent of that market it makes the cost of licenses pale by comparison.

A lost opportunity of $10 billion/ year has a net present value of around $25 billion. If that represented the cost of doing nothing, spending $10-12 billion to buy more spectrum seems like a way to save $15-13 billion. I count on Verizon Wireless to go all out before the auctions and to bid ferociously during them.

This show is only starting folks. don’t touch that dial.

Our Call Waiting Tone Went Missing

A good part of the last couple days has been spent looking for missing call waiting tones. Call waiting tones are the soft background beeps that usually are heard when you are talking on the phone and someone else tries to call your phone. The sound you’ll typically hear is a double beep of around 440 Hertz for 300 milliseconds. Well, we lost ours.

We’re not entirely certain when we lost it. Looking back, it appears that the first subscriber report may have been received in mid-September. Only recently have the volume of complaints risen to a level that caused anyone to intervene. (There’s probably a process improvement or two lurking within that statement.)
Because call waiting tones are provided by a component of the Nortel switch, we immediately opened a dialog with their Technical Assistance Service (TAS.) Starting yesterday morning several engineers at Nortel TAS with on a conference bridge with several of our Engineers trying to isolate the problem. Continue reading “Our Call Waiting Tone Went Missing”