- 65+ new operator licences signed by the Italian regulator in 2 years drives demand for fast, accurate interconnect billing solutions
13th January 2000: Intec Telecom Systems, the worldwide market leader in interconnect settlement and billing software for telecoms companies, has opened sales and support offices in Milan and Rome to meet market demand. Supported by the London-based European HQ, the offices will bring local support to Intec’s InterconnecT™ customers in Italy, including Telecom Italia, InfoStrada and Telexis. InterconnecT offers interconnect billing and settlement management against Telecom Italia and major international carriers such as COLT and MCI Worldcom as well as most other major carriers in the world today. It is also designed to cope with a high degree of change in regulations and business rules.
The multi-lingual, multi-currency capabilities of InterconnecT, widely-regarded as the most powerful and functional solution available today, and locally recruited expertise, offers Italian carriers the ability to implement fast and accurate interconnect billing to all their global partners. The solution extends across a full range of traditional fixed and mobile voice and data services. It is also highly scalable from the needs of the smallest start-up operator to those of the very largest carriers at 200 million and more Call Data Records (CDRs) per eight-hour period.
InterconnecT, which is widely used by some of Europe’s best-known operators, including France Telecom, Telecom Italia and Swisscom as well as smaller operators such as Orange, Telewest, Connect One and diAx, has been designed for fully internationalised operation, including local language support, multi-currency billing, and Euro-compliance. It is also one of few solutions able to manage CDR re-pricing as an automated and proven process and able to do so without slowing down normal CDR processing.
For start-up and smaller operators, Intec also offers very fast access to interconnect billing via InterconnecT ASP; an Application Service Provision facility. Operators such as sunrise in Switzerland were able to commence an interconnect billing operation within weeks, and in time for their launch without needing to employ IT skills, interconnect billing personnel or having to invest in a supporting IT infrastructure: Intec’s ASP service displaced the need for all these complexities and costs.
“Interconnect billing is vital to operators that want to maximise the profitability of their networks,” said Riccardo Vicari, Managing Director of Intec Telecom Systems Italia. “Interconnect bills can be up to 80% of an operators costs for start-ups, and as much as 60% of their income (achieved, for instance, through free-net retail strategies), so billing speed and accuracy are vital to cashflow and profit margins – especially given the degree of price competition in subscriber charges. A one-percent inaccuracy in interconnect invoices could cost an operator millions of dollars.”
Some operators might think they can develop their own interconnect billing solution, bundle it with retail billing, or handle it informally. However, in reality, with today’s product and network complexities, the growing number of potential interconnect partners, the frequent and sudden tariff/regulation changes, and the exponential CDR volume growth successful carriers might expect, those days are long gone.
“Interconnect is becoming an increasingly complex and strategic subject,” says Vicari, “and many European carriers are implementing specialist billing solutions like Intec’s InterconnecT to ensure they can compete in new markets, and generate and audit interconnect bills properly. To help Italian operators implement InterconnecT quickly in their own situations, Intec Telecom Systems also provides professional services expertise.”
The latest version of InterconnecT, Version 6.0.4, features a number of enhancements that will be particularly relevant to Italian operators, including multiple language support, automatic reconciliation between carriers, scalability from the smallest to the largest networks, support for ITU-based settlement and many others. The flexibility of InterconnecT in handling many different types of products and interconnect agreements is also vital in a fast-developing market like Italy.
“InterconnecT is the solution of choice for many new European operators as well as established ones and we expect it to be very successful in Italy, because the market here is developing rapidly,” says Kevin Adams, Managing Director Intec Telecom Systems. “The ability of carriers to take advantage of the dynamism in the market depends heavily on their ability to implement information systems that support the business agreements they want to make, and on their ability to bill and audit interconnect charges to maximise revenues.”