Mobile Time in a Box
Time in a Bottle was a hit song by Jim Croce in the 70’s. Maybe his inspiration came from atomic clocks instead of his newborn son? Not likely.
I recently had an interview with Symmetricom and the topic was about time. Mobile carriers heavily advertise minute plans to feed our hunger to talk on the mobile phone. But a dirty little secret that is cause for alarming is their approach for managing time. For the purposes on billing and logging all of those minutes that all of us consume each month, it’s critical that mobile operators get it right. It’s also of great concern to the subscriber as well.
Here’s an example why time is so vital to mobile usage. If I place a call and speak with a friend for 4 minutes and 59 seconds, I should only be charged for 4 minutes used. But in this scenario, assume that the billing and timestamps are off by as much as 2 seconds, which bumps up the call to 5 minutes and 1 second. The 2 second difference causes my call to be charge as 5 minutes instead of 4 minutes. This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but multiple that by all the subscribers once on the AT&T network. That amounts to 71 million minutes daily and over 25 trillion minutes annually stolen from subscribers!
Now look at another scenario. Roaming agreements between mobile carriers is common place all over the world. If I take a road trip from San Francisco to New York, I cross through some patches throughout my journey where I am roaming. It might feel seamless to me as I chat my way across the country, but for mobile carriers, this can cause a lot of heartache. Adding up minutes is revenue that must be reconciled between carriers and the money involved is quite significant. Mobile operators have an Internet Protocol/Call Detail Record (IPDR/CDR) reconciliation process that is not optimized to record time accurately. This leads to unpredictable revenue leakage which can be as high as 1/2%, which translates into millions of dollars of revenue lost annually.
Turns out that most mobile carriers have very “loosey goosey” attitude when it comes to managing their core business: time. The critical component is managing NTP or Network Time Protocol. As this service attempts to sync clients and servers, the unpredictable element is the propagation of time across a network. The moment a timestamp is generated, it must immediately be sent and received by the other end. Any delay causes time to be off; and there is no feedback loop nor adjustment algorithm to adjust for delays. Now think on a larger scale of 71 million subscribers and all the network infrastructure it takes to support that. It’s possible that a large percent of the network has time that is off as much as 5 minutes or more. Think back to that 4 minute and 58 second call. If the timestamps are off by 5 minutes, that would mean that the call was either free or double the length it really was!
The loss of minutes and loss of revenue can be staggering, what can be done about it? Symmetricom has a solution that can provide a high availability NTP servers that can improve the accuracy and precision of timestamps. This can allow NTP time sync to be corrected and within a tighter tolerance across an entire network. Overall this can recover lost revenue that could not be previously reconciled. Fixing the revenue leakage also has some side effects. It can lower Customer Service complaints which makes everyone all around more satisfied and productive. Given the high cost of Customer Support calls, the loss in revenue and poor management of time for a mobile operator, it makes good sense to shore up one of the critical areas of their business. This also has a lasting effect in that it helps to manage a critical component of accurate, precise time.
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