The New Generation of IN Systems: Operators retake control of their networks

Due to today’s highly competitive marketplace, operators must rapidly develop new applications with more personalized services. In order to be reactive to intense market pressures, network infrastructures must be capable of evolving to provide maximum flexibility. Matthieu Loreille and Fergus O' Reilly discuss the landscape of these new networks and how the new generation of IN Systems will transform operators’ relationship with the marketplace.

Matthieu Loreille, Marketing Director jNetX

Fergus O’Reilly, VP Product Strategy at Highdeal

Transaction Reporter: How do you define Intelligent Networks?

Matthieu Loreille: The first IN’s appeared to simplify the routing of calls to special numbers like toll-free numbers. These services, considered basic today, used to be quite complex to deploy, configure and maintain. A person can call a toll-free number to order a pizza without knowing where his call is going to end up being routed to. An operator will redirect the call according to certain pre-established parameters: geography (the nearest pizzeria), time (according to hours of operation, the day of the week). This simple service used to require provisioning all of the telephone network switches with all of the restaurant telephone numbers associated with the toll-free number and also defining all the potential routing scenarios.

Fergus O’ Reilly: Updating the networks to support these new, enhanced services was considerable complex and costly. Operators were therefore driven to decouple their basic call switching logic from more intelligent functionality tied to routing and call management.

M.L: The concept of an IN is to gather all decisions onto a single, central platform: call establishment, routing authorization, monitoring, real-time pricing, rating and charging of user accounts; leaving the switches with only the basic function of routing everything according to the instructions transmitted through the IN platform which therefore ends up controlling the call.

T.R: Why do we talk today about “new generation" IN solutions?”

F.O.R: In an increasingly competitive economy, it is essential that operators can develop more and more personalized services. As a consequence, networks must be inherently flexible to enable operators to keep pace with the rapidly changing market. To accomplish this, it is necessary to shorten development time and the cost of implementation.

M.L: With new value-added mobile services, networks have to manage a growing number of parameters emanating from a variety of sources. To accomplish this, IN platforms must become extremely adaptable and control a variety of protocols: querying SMS and MMS Centers, interacting with users using interactive voice or USSD-based text messaging, or pin pointing user’s location using global-positioning/localization.
Intelligent Networks no longer only control call setup but also manage more sophisticated session-based services such as data sessions (GPRS, UMTS) and IMS, acting in this case as a SIP Application Server. The IN therefore becomes a Convergent Service Platform.

F.O.R: For pricing and charging accounts, the new IN platforms must be able to transmit requests to systems such as Highdeal Transactive and wait for authorization before routing a call or session.

M.L: They must accommodate individuals’ finely personalized service preferences and manage specific instructions, for example forwarding to another number if the called number is busy, filtering incoming calls while abroad in order to avoid paying extra roaming charges, or even restricting calls to a set of approved numbers. Operators today require easily accessible databases with detailed customer usage profiles.

T.R: Why were traditional IN systems illequipped to handle such developments?

F.O.R: The old generation of IN systems were built using proprietary technologies. Because of this, the development of new services took a lot of custom development and was inevitably time consuming and often very expensive.

M.L: Operators want to control the development of their networks at their own rate and rhythm and they want to free themselves from the “black boxes” imposed by any individual vendor. For this reason, they are turning to standards-based platforms that allow them to quickly deploy new services and leverage development expertise from a wide range of suppliers.

T.R: What are these new standards?

M.L: The new generation of IN systems runs on the JAIN SLEE technology developed in Java (Java for the Advanced Intelligent Network - Service Logic Execution Environment). Initiated by Sun Microsystems, Open Cloud and Vodafone, this new generation of IN systems has been standardized since March 2004 and utilized by an international community of developers. Moreover, this new standard benefits from partnerships with international companies such as IBM, who do not get involved with the older generation of network equipment provider solutions. So operators can be assisted with local expertise in their diverse locations around the world.

T.R: Can you give us some examples of the advantages of the new generation of IN for operators?

M.L: Recently, the Lithuanian operator, Bite Group (owned by the TDC Group) created, developed, tested, and launched a new prepaid service in only three months. It would have been unthinkable and impossible to implement a new service this quickly in the older generation of proprietary environments. In the same way all operators may now develop new services and benefit from a wide community of IT developers.

F.O.R: What’s more, the new platforms can interface seamlessly with legacy systems, reducing costs and ensuring a return on existing investments.

T.R: In what way are the jNetX and Highdeal solutions synergistic?

F.O.R: Both the jNetX and Highdeal solutions are Java-based and offer the same end-to-end flexibility. Highdeal can price, rate, and manage prepaid and postpaid accounts based on unlimited criteria. It is essential that these criteria be measured on the network and sent to Highdeal, for example, the nature of an MMS depends on the attachments (images, sound or video clips) or the duration of the call and its localization. The jNetX IN platform does this very well.