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September 24, 2009
Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due
If BellSouth agrees to credit an overbilling error, the customer must submit claims for the entire overbilled timeframe. BellSouth will not automatically issue credits for the overbilling that occurred between the disputed invoices and when they corrected the billing. In order to obtain credit for the lag between the disputed invoices and billing correction, a subsequent claim must be filed requesting this credit.
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Early Termination Charges
If you deal with Verizon invoices on a regular basis, it is likely that you have come across early termination charges to meet minimum billing requirements at some point. These charges are billed in the OC&C for circuits that are moved or disconnected before the in-service minimum period has been met. The in-service minimum period is established by circuit type in FCC Tariff 1, Section 5.2.5, but is generally a minimum of one year for rate elements under the National Discount Plan. Early termination charges are calculated to bill the remaining balance of the minimum in-service period.
In some instances, you may come across circuits that are billing early termination charges in the OC&C as well as monthly recurring charges. A common reason for this charge to generate is a circuit move to a new building. From FCC #1, Section 7.4.5 (b), “Moves to a different building will be treated as a discontinuance and start of service and all associated nonrecurring charges will apply. New minimum period and/or Service Discount Plan requirements will be established for the new services.”
However, in the same tariff the definition of a move is given as “a change in the physical location of the customer’s premises which also involves a connection to a different rate demarcation point.” When generating these charges, the move requirements are often not met and overlooked by Verizon, which in turn generates the charge incorrectly.
When you come across these early termination charges it can be valuable to take time to look further into the issue. Verify whether a disconnect order was actually placed, if the circuit is still billing, and if so whether the requirements to be considered a move are met. These charges are substantial and can bill on any number of circuits with the potential to cost a large amount in invalid charges.
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September 15, 2009
NECA Banded Rate Structure for Facility Circuits
The NECA rate banding process is a function of cost where NECA vendors with similar costs are banded into distinct rate bands. There are 10 rate bands (1 through 10) going from the least to most expensive. Each rate band’s rates are equal to the average cost per rate element for the vendors in that band.
NECA vendors have incentives to keep costs low and remain at a lower rate band. The lower cost companies in each rate band charge lower than average rates to their customers thus gaining from the revenue pooling in their particular rate band or revenue pool since NECA members automatically participate in revenue pooling
The NECA Tariff F.C.C. No. 5 Section 17.5.1 has a list of companies that do business under NECA with rate bands for: Multiline Business End User Common Line (MLB EUCL) and Local Transport/Special Access as well as Local Switching and Tandem Switched Transport for Usage.
In order to verify billed Facility Circuit rates for a given vendor an auditor would first have to verify that the vendor is on the list of NECA vendors (Sec 17.5.1) in order to use the NECA tariff; once the vendor is vetted as a NECA vendor the appropriate rate band for Facility Circuit rates would be found under the heading of Local Transport/Special Access.
The Facility Circuit rates are listed under Special or Switched Access sections and broken out by rate elements (Channel Terminations/Entrance Facility, Channel Mileage Termination and Channel Mileage Facility and MUX) for varying circuit capacities such as DS1, DS, OC3 and up to OC 12 – for both one time nonrecurring charges (NRCs), access service charges and monthly recurring charges (MRCs). Additionally, optional rate plan term discount percentages for 36 and 60 months are listed at 10% and 20% respectively.
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September 14, 2009
SONETS: Lord of the rings
Newton’s Telecom Dictionary defines a SONET, Synchronous Optical Network, as a family of fiber optic transmission rates from 51.84 million bits per second to 13.27 gigabits per second, created to provide the flexibility needed to transport many digital signals with different capacities, and to provide a design standard for manufacturers. The benefits of SONET include a reduction in equipment requirements, increased network reliability and generic standards which enables transmission products from multiple vendors to be connected. Capacity ranges from 28 DS1s or 1 DS3 on an OC-1 all the way up to 21,504 DS1s or 768 DS3s on an OC-768.
There are a variety of configurations available including rings. Rings provide connectivity to multiple customer designated locations or nodes. The segments of a ring can be identified by the SCID/SNID. A couple of things to keep in mind when auditing a SONET ring are ports and mileage. There are two types of nodes, Central Office and Customer Premise. A minimum of two nodes must be billed and at least one node on a ring must be a Central Office node. The number of ports allowed on a node is determined by its size. An indicator to determine the number and type of ports allowed to bill is the provisioned NCI code. The 7th, 8th and 9th characters indicate the type and quantity of lower level circuits being ported. The NCI Dictionary offers a matrix of the quantity and speed of drops. When looking at the mileage, it is billed between nodes. Mapping out the ring helps determine the points to use to calculate the mileage to validate that it is being correctly billed.
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September 09, 2009
So you have all the data. Now what?
So you have all your billing data in your cost management system, each month gathering yet another month worth of data.
Seems like you should be able to do something with all that data. Luckily, thanks to the power of reporting tools available, you now have all the data you need to report on all that history. If you're lucky enough to be using a reporting tool like Business Objects or Crystal Reports, you don't have to learn pesky things like SQL select commands or how the tables relate to each other. If you aren't using those tools, the roads a little longer but still quite manageable. MS Access or SQL plus are willing servants, even if they take a little cajoling to do your bidding. What's in a good report? There are some tricks to it that seem really obvious, but so often gets skipped over. Let's start off simply.
Have a Plan: Really, it's that simple. It helps to know what you're looking for in the beginning and have a goal in mind. Even if it turns out that the report becomes something completely different from what you had in mind at the started, having a plan will save a whole lot of time and writers block.
Write out a list of things you think will help you write a meaningful report. Don't worry about getting it perfect, you can always change it later. Having a plan in mind when you sit down at your computer means you don't have to sit there staring blankly at all the fields available.
Now that you have your plan and you're actually in to the meat of building a query: Don't fall into the trap of too much data. It's so easy to just pull in one or two more extra fields. Always think about who you're giving the report to and what kind of data is going to be meaningful to them. Is it for someone with experience that will understand the significance of Mileage Rating Points or BIPs? Or is it someone that is more interested in the breakdown of Municipal vs State taxes? If you can make the data meaningful to your audience, they'll appreciate it more, they'll use it more, and you won't have wasted all that time on a report that is just “good enough”.
Be selective about what you actually put in the report:
Tools like Business Object let you pull a great deal of data all at once, but give you the flexibility to include certain fields and will combine data where appropriate without the hassle of rebuilding the query. After you have pulled the query, check to see if you really need all the data you retrieved. Was it for one vendor? Was it for one time period? Why not pull those fields out and use them to title your report. It'll cut down on some of the clutter in your table and it looks better for presentation purposes. Does it make sense the way you've arranged the data? If you're looking at only disputes, do you really need to know what the monthly recurring charges are for that circuit? That information can be pulled into a different table if you need it, but for a dispute report all those extra numbers just confuse the picture and make the results harder to read. Just remember that not everyone that might see the report will have the same background or be as familiar with the data as you.
Now to polish it off:
How are you presenting your findings? Is it on paper or an excel spreadsheet? Maybe email with a table pasted into the body? However you're doing it remember that someone else needs to read it. An excel spreadsheet is good because you can lock the cells so that relevant information stays on the page while the rest of the table gets scrolled through. An email body might require a lot of editing with the promise of more information as it's requested. Paper is hard to put lots of information into because big tables look like city maps on paper, you really have to make sure the important information is right there and it leaps out at you. Put the big picture stuff at the top in a header to keep it clean and try to keep the scrolling to a minimum by setting related fields next to each other. Remember, data that's at opposite ends of the table or on the next page might as well not be there at all. If it's all too much, break it up into several different tables, recurring charges in one table and taxes in another, if you need both of them, take out USOCs or contract dates and put them in a different report.
Just remember some important rules and your reporting will be successful.
1) Have a Plan, it's much easier to keep your head about you when you have a destination in mind.
2) Make sure your data is the important data. Refer to your plan and keep your audience in mind.
3) Think about the Fourth person that will see the report after you deliver it. Will it make sense to someone if you haven't explained how the data is important and related?
4) Presentation Matters. Keep it simple and meaningful. Take up as little space as you can while still conveying your message.
5) Always be aware that all that extra information is still out there, you don't have to give it all up at the same time.
The short lesson is that the better your report, the more useful it is, the better your organization can make decisions and act on them. That makes everyone look better, have a better day, and increases the productivity of your office.
Posted in at 09:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
September 01, 2009
The Benchmark Audit
Audits revolve around many different concepts; perhaps one of the most common is a rate audit. Benchmark audit is the term many use to describe whether a carrier is charging the appropriate rate. For Interstate benchmark purposes, the CLECs have to mirror the ILEC serving their areas. For Intrastate the rules and regulations change by state. There are a couple things that can be determined and organized at the beginning to save time and make the audit run smoother. When looking at a benchmark audit one of the first things to look is to see how a carrier is billing – element, or by composite. Once that is determined look at the different elements they are billing, sometimes on a bill the same elements are listed in different ways. Grouping the elements at the beginning will save time in the long run. Sometimes bills can be hard to decipher, but time can be saved by doing a little organization in the beginning before the audit begins; rate detail accuracy is of utmost importance when it comes to this type of audit.
Posted in Audit at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
