Revenue Assurance from a Regulator’s point of view
Telecom regulators in emerging markets are losing revenues due to the absence of governance and lack of transparency in the telecom industry, and the two main reasons are (1) fraud impacting CSP’s networks and subscribers as well as (2) the absence of traffic and revenue monitoring, leading to full dependency on the operators’ revenues declarations without any verification.
On the other hand, the telecom industry is rapidly evolving nowadays and the competition among players is forcing innovation in products and services to keep their competitive edge and enhance their customer retention. In that sense, the mission of telecom regulators has become more challenging due to the evolution in emerging technologies and fast changes in the industry’s trends, forcing regulators to invest in traffic monitoring and revenue assurance solutions and making it essential for regulatory authorities to regain control over the ICT sector by implementing an independent source of reporting for the volume of the operators’ traffic and the size of their revenue streams.
However, some regulators are still perceiving traffic monitoring as a simple mission of counting the number of minutes, SMS, MB, top-ups and mobile money transactions to estimate the revenues generated by voice, SMS and data services. This approach isn’t accurate as it doesn’t take into consideration some important inputs that may impact the calculation of revenues. This approach is considered a good solution for traffic monitoring to an extent as it does not cover the full revenues of the operators especially since it is only a source for the regulator to calculate the estimated revenues without having an exhaustive and detailed look covering multiple levels.
On the other hand, some other regulators replicate the rating and billing mechanisms of the telcos by implementing a parallel BSS that performs the collection of data from the operator’s network elements or from passive probes and adopt the same rating rules applied by the operators. This approach is very hard to implement and even if the mission is successfully done, the maintenance process becomes a headache for both vendor and client given the amount of work involved upon the operator’s introduction of any new offer or rating rule.
In both cases, the output of the monitoring mission is questionable: in the first case, revenues are estimated, and in the second case revenues may not be well monitored over time.
For this, the ultimate approach would be to implement a solution that provides a detailed view on all the revenues of the operators without having to replicate the operators’ full billing process with the means to verify collected revenues from other sources of data which can be gathered from network elements or passive probes.
Vanrise has the tools, knowhow, and experience to accompany telecom regulators on this journey and render easier the implementation of a fully-fledged traffic and revenue monitoring platform that does not impact the operators’ business but more importantly provides regulators with all the necessary tools to enforce transparency, improve the telecom sector and generate new revenue streams.
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