The importance of maintaining accurate interconnect billing is becoming crucial for telecom operators, as the number of carriers and their associated traffic, pricing scenarios, and interconnect agreements is increasing.

ESKA^® Interconnect presents an advanced tool to seamlessly manage the complex processes of settling commercial transactions between carriers providing interconnect services.


 Strengths

• Efficiency
  ESKA^® Interconnect is highly efficient in using processor time and occupying memory storage space.
• Flexible and Easy-to-Use GUI
  All system features are accessible through a Graphical User Interface (GUI) that is easy to understand and use, which allows users to perform daily transactions smoothly and effectively.
• Scalability
  ESKA^® Interconnect is a fully scalable system that supports global interconnect regulations. The system can be easily adjusted to meet customer needs and latest market dynamics such as adding new traffic types and services.
• Wide Rating Support
  The system provides powerful real-time rating capabilities to cater for existing and next-generation services; these include SMS and MMS traffic in addition to traditional voice traffic for complex multi-step and multi-component rating rules.
• Total Control
  The system enables operators to manage their new product rollout plans with total control. ESKA^® Interconnect’s volume-based rating features allow operators to present flexible agreements and define rates based on traffic volumes, such as committed volumes and a variety of other user-definable criteria.
• Web Access
  ESKA^® Interconnect is fully Web-based, providing ease of access to all system features and stored data.
  
  The System is n-tier, object-oriented, and component-based with an interface that has been developed using Microsoft.NET; the underlying modules are based on Java and C++.

 Main Functionalities

ESKA^® Interconnect presents a wide variety of functional features that add to the strengths of the product.

• Carrier Management
  ESKA^® Interconnect maintains full records of an operator’s partner agreements. It also provides near real-time monitoring of the financial position with each partner.
• Price Plan Management
  The system allows defining all network service tariffs that are assigned to a given partner. It also supports the routing of interconnected traffic by configuring the network to deliver the required service to customers, while maximising the operating margin. Moreover, the system’s importing utility allows importing price lists received from different carriers with diverse formats into a single standardised database repository to be used for rating and routing management purposes.
• Rating Engine
  The system has a powerful rating engine that manipulates calls with high performance due to the strong design and technology applied. It also provides the flexibility to calculate calls according to various parameters and to monitor rejected calls in order to fix them and re-process them later. In addition, the system supports re-rating processes when the operator needs to repeat the rating process after the Charging Detailed Records have been already processed and the cost calculated.
• Invoice Management
  ESKA^® Interconnect provides operators with periodic financial invoices that can be modified in matter of layout. In addition, different types of discount and taxation scenarios are covered through invoice calculation.
• Reconciliation
  The system can reconcile carrier input with the invoices issued by the operator. Reconciliation can show any discrepancies between the invoices of both sides and apply a record-by-record matching if required.
• Revenue Sharing
• ESKA^® Interconnect enables companies involved in the delivery of revenue sharing services to effectively manage all key aspects of revenue generation. These include partner relationship management, service charging, invoice generation, and settlement of revenues and expenses between different parties responsible for delivering these services.
  
  The system also helps network operators, service providers, and financial intermediaries generate income from services such as voice, SMS, MMS, music, video, and image downloads.
  Partner Web Access
• The system offers real-time Web-based access, which allows partners to log-in through a secure Internet connection to check sent/ received calls and durations. They can also review invoice details, settlements, balances, agreements, and setup information.
  Powerful Reporting
  ESKA^® Interconnect comes with a set of standard reports that cater for the main market requirements. These reports include:
  
  

  • Daily or monthly, incoming or outgoing traffic graphs
  • Billing period summary
  • Top incoming or outgoing destinations by cost or duration
  • Incoming or outgoing ports traffic

  The system’s reporting functionalities also support custom report generation, integration of custom reports with standard and user-defined reports, multiple saving formats, and data filtering options for billing and traffic reports.
• Alerts
  The system allows setting and triggering alerts when reaching preset thresholds for each carrier’s incoming and outgoing traffic volumes.
• Price List Loader
  ESKA^® Interconnect is equipped with a Price List importing utility; a strong and dynamic tool that handles different formats of price lists exchanged between operators and interconnect partners.
  
  The system enables operators to:
  
  

  • Create custom price list templates for mapping received price lists information into a unified format, which simplifies the process of updating interconnect tariffs;
  • Validate received price lists by checking new and missing destinations, and generate reports so for the operator to decide on required actions;
  • Consolidate certain price list types where destination prefixes and costs from different lists are merged into a single price list that would be manipulated by the operator.
• Administration
  The Administration module within ESKA^® Interconnect provides powerful tools to manage the system’s security, user privileges, transaction auditing, and archived reference data.