by Greg Council, group product manager, numbering solutions, Evolving Systems

Numbering resources are a key asset to telecoms operators – yet they also present them with a range of major challenges. Number management is now more complicated than ever due to the impact of local number portability activity, complex service offerings from providers that might include both mobile and fixed-line numbers, and increased reporting needs to meet the latest regulations.

Managing the number inventory accurately is a critical requirement for any operator. Poor management can lead to problems with quality, multiple assignments of the same number, complex multi-system data synchronisation issues and, most importantly of all, unhappy customers.

Scoping the Challenges

Today’s telcoms operators are well aware of the need to manage their number resources as efficiently as possible to ensure that they always have the right type of number available to meet any eventuality. Achieving this has, however, always been a challenge – and the nature of that challenge has changed dramatically over time.

Ten years ago, operators’ main concerns around number management related to first acquiring numbers, then allocating them and then reporting their utilisation to the regulatory authorities. Operators had to show ‘true need’ every time they ordered numbers and if they could not demonstrate to the regulators that they were using those numbers within a specified time-period they were forced to return them. The challenge for operators was simply understanding and reporting the utilisation of numbers across a range of regional business centres. It was a complex requirement but. even so, many operators tried to accommodate it through bespoke systems or by customising existing solutions.

Today, this need for a combination of usage monitoring and accurate reporting is still key for most operators, especially as emerging regions become more stringent about how numbers are managed and allocated.

At the same time, however, we are seeing increased interest from operators in better understanding and managing the total lifecycle of individual numbers so that when a customer leaves they can more effectively manage the reallocation of the number they leave behind. This capability has become particularly critical in the wireless communications space, where numbers must be constantly available in the pool to support rapid allocation and ultimately the expansion and growth of the operator’s footprint in the sector. Making the challenge still more difficult, users in many countries simply purchase a new SIM card when the previous pre-paid balance is exhausted, resulting in dramatic growth in the volume of telephone number churn.

Without an effective number management approach, operators often find that when they go to activate subscribers there is either no number available or alternatively the number they try to assign is already allocated to an existing customer. Typically, this results in an inability to provision a particular service to the customer, potentially leading to the loss of business and ultimately even of competitive edge.

The challenges facing operators are further compounded by a related number management concern – the need to manage other number oriented resources in line with the diversification of the sector in general and the growth of the wireless sector in particular. SIM cards, and the MSISDN and IMSI numbers that are associated with them all need to be dealt with effectively. And this challenge relates both to provisioning and also the additional resources that are required to activate a wireless subscriber.

As they grew their wireless subscriber base, operators came to realise that when they activated a new subscriber they did not just need the correct telephone number for a specific region, they also needed to manage the allocation of the corresponding SIM and IMSI required to activate the relevant handset. Just as importantly, those numbers would all have to be managed efficiently from initial receipt to activation and provisioning and then through the entire customer lifecycle.

Operators’ development of more complex service offerings, presents them with another related challenge. As the demand for phone numbers grows, the management of phone numbers and associated resources becomes more complex. Ensuring a number is ‘clean’ before assigning it to a customer is increasingly important, but difficult to achieve as number inventory is often dispersed across multiple billing and CRM systems.

Issues with the Legacy Approach

So, how effective have operators been in overcoming these challenges so far? Historically, they have taken one of two approaches. Some operators decided to use their in-house IT team to create their own internal system while others have preferred to extend the functionality of existing third party-provided billing or network systems to cover the requirement.

Unfortunately, with both of these approaches, there are issues with scalability and flexibility. Both methods fail to handle large volumes of telephone numbers effectively and both struggle to deal with the need to continuously activate new numbering resources on the network. These systems also typically neglect entirely the need to efficiently manage the numbering resource lifecycle.

As communications services have grown and evolved, service providers have come to realize the difficulties of expanding their capabilities associated with management of numbering resources. For example, the seemingly basic need of searching and allocating numbers by type or rate centre is difficult without actively managing the type of resource including tracking the status of the resource through its lifecycle This results in negatively impacting the business agility of the operator concerned by preventing it from allocating a particular type of number to a specific subscriber.

The inability to manage resources by a variety of states and combinations also raises significant challenges for those service providers that wish to market new innovative services. For example, an emerging practice is to reserve and price numbers based upon business value, often called ‘vanity’ or ‘golden’ numbers. With legacy systems, it has often been difficult for operators to search numbers by patterns and then either pre-provision them or set them aside to be allocated later.

Towards the Next Generation

So, with legacy systems failing to deliver the versatility and functionality required to handle their increasingly complex needs, operators are now looking towards a new generation of number management solutions, which allow them to enjoy the business benefits of expanded and flexible resource management on cost-effective computing platforms.

The best of these next generation solutions have expanded core capability in several areas. These solutions are capable, for example, of handling the standard need to categorise and store numbers and manage their state proactively throughout the lifecycle. This capability then allows operators to better monitor and understand number allocation and create and submit the necessary reports to satisfy any business or regulatory requirement.

The best next-generation number management solutions have also evolved to the point where they allow operators to define their own number states – ‘active’, ‘inactive’, or ‘pending activation’, for example, and then track and monitor those states across the lifecycle.

A third key area of improvement is through expansion of managed resources to include the procurement, bundling, and allocation of wireless numbering resources along with a telephone number.

Handling Complexity and Delivering Efficiency

To be effective, today’s number management solutions need to be able to translate complexity into straightforward solutions delivery. They must be capable of supporting a single number inventory source for all types of numbering resources including mobile, fixed line and VoIP. Equally, they must provide extensive yet simplified integration support for multiple and diverse systems such as billing, network, and number portability through service oriented architectures.

For efficient management of numbering resource inventories, it is important to consider the ability to gather and react to information through near real-time updates, process automation and the flexibility to handle difficult exception scenarios. The most sophisticated solutions are now incorporating key functions that can significantly improve number management efficiency.

Typically, these new capabilities inventory dashboards that provide number administrators with up-to-date utilisation calculations and forecasts for all markets and regions, the ability to create custom rules to ensure number inventory never empties of available numbers and automated utilisation notifications that enable operators to find out about number shortages before they become a problem.

Looking Ahead

Today’s operators are increasingly demanding open, centralised number management systems with the flexibility and scalability necessary to enable them to store, assign and track their entire mobile number inventories. By using the latest number management systems, operators can not only ensure that they better manage their number-related inventory but also that they always have the numbers they need to meet customer demand, which in today’s fast-moving telecoms environment is becoming ever more difficult to predict.