Open Settlement Protocol (OSP)

(mostly) off-line settlement between operators based on Call Detail Records

Open Settlement Protocol developed as part of ETSI project TIPHON (Telecommunications and Internet Protocol Harmonization Over Networks) [ETSI DTS/TIPHON-03004]

Based on exchange of Extensible Markup Language (XML) messages via HTTP

<!DOCTYPE Message [

<!ELEMENT Message((PricingIndication |

PricingConfirmation|

AuthorisationRequest |

AuthorisationResponse |

AuthorisationIndication |

AuthorisationConfirmation|

UsageIndication |

UsageConfirmation |

ReauthorisationRequest |

ReauthorisationResponse )+ ) >

... ]>

Slide Notes

Telecommunications and Internet Protocol Harmonization Over Networks (TIPHON): Inter-domain pricing, authorisation, and usage exchange; ETSI DTS/TIPHON-03004 V1.4.0 (1998-09).

Transcript

[slide462] So, not surprisingly, people have introduced an open settlement protocol. And the idea is, basically, you have an XML description, and now you can carry the information you want, about the prices, the authorization, how much usage there was, etc. And now you can exchange that with others. So, many years ago, I had a thesis project student, she worked for Le7 in France, and her specialty was dealing with the billing between her operator and other operators. Because, yes, the operators charge each other money for putting calls through and terminating calls. And one of the difficulties is that the prices change as a function of time, day of week, volume, etc. And it becomes, actually, a very, very difficult problem for them to do these settlements. And it was really perplexing, because, yes, there are countries in different time zones in Europe. And because of time of day pricing, it may be advantageous to say, actually, what I'm going to do is a scheme like this, where I'll set the call up from the UK to France, because I can now get a cheaper price, because it's a different time zone, and I get the lower price. Versus making the call the other direction, where I might pay a higher price. And one of the former students I had worked for Digital Equipment Corporation in France, and he re-engineered their whole telecom network, so that everything was based about going via a place in England, even if you were going from one site in France to another site in France. Why? Because there was competition on international calls. There was no competition locally. So by buying volume traffic, they could send all of their traffic from the south of France to Grenoble, cheaper than they could by internally going directly from Sophie Antipolis to Grenoble. So exploiting these price differences is important. Anyone know what that's called in economics? Arbitrage. You take advantage of the fact that there's a difference in the price at different places, and it basically means if you do it in stock trading, for instance, you can know the stock is selling for this price here, the stock is selling for that price there, what do I do? I know both prices, I execute simultaneous buys and sells, and I make money. If you're smart. But arbitrage is a very, very big thing in telecom, and there are actually arbitrage entities that exist simply to do arbitrage between different operators, because the different operators buy and sell connectivity capacity to each other. It's even a tiered market. So if you want to send SMSs, depending upon the response time that you want, so if we look at the price, if I want to be able to have a high guarantee that the message will get there very quickly, I pay a very high price. But if I'm willing to wait a long time to have the message delivered, I get it at a very low price. So there are operators that are purely in the business of going out and buying bulk SMS capacity from operators, and then repackaging it sliced up in this way, and so now you can say, ah, I can sell you a million SMSs at this for a month. Very, very, very interesting.