Blog — Page 10

Spring is here !

April 2, 2018 By Timo

Spring time, what a lovely time of the year.

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, the days are getting longer. The sunshine is warming up the ground and we are seeing the first signs of new growth, as the crocuses and tulips start to poke their way out of the ground.

The Easter holiday is done, Passover is almost complete and today marks the first working day of Q2. A quarter of the year is now done and in the books. Did you accomplish everything you wanted to this last quarter ? Meet your goals for revenue, for adding customers ? Or did those three months just pass by in a blur before you could even set your goals ?

Well, Amitel can help.

This Spring, Amitel would like to help you with growth. It is the natural time of year to be considering growing, and for a telecom business that means the top line; revenue. Amitel can help you look at your strategies and tactics, how to position your offerings against Big Telco and against Silicon Valley and their apps. Amitel can also advise on gaining new revenue sources internationally, from outside of Canada.

It can be as simple as a one-off brain-storming session. Or a longer term project commitment. Mentorship opportunities or perhaps a retainer for periodic telephone consulting. However you need assistance and counsel, Amitel can provide it in a customized manner.

Your Friend in Telecom is here for you. Call me.

Filed Under: Consulting

Telecom Fraud never takes a holiday

March 28, 2018 By Timo

It is an unfortunate fact that the hackers of the world like to plan their attacks on public holidays when network supervision may not be at its highest.

Please remember to be vigilant this Easter season and guard access to your switches.

As highlighted on this blog AurorA has taken other steps such as the weekly reports of suspicous blocked call attempts, robust and accurate dial plan and intensified focus on high quality terminating routes.

Have a safe and happy Easter season .

Timo Vainionpaa

Filed Under: Fraud

Fraud Protection – Caribbean

March 19, 2018 By Timo

In our last few posts we have outlined some of the fraud threats that we face in providing international voice termination. Specifically we have looked at International Revenue Sharing Fraud. See my posts here and here

Today I want to alert you to the new hotspot for fraud, the Caribbean. Certain carriers in the Caribbean are reselling telephone numbers for Revenue Sharing and assigning them to hackers.

This is a huge threat for fraud. First, it is not viable to block the whole route as most carriers have legitimate traffic to the destination, especially here in Canada where there is a large diaspora from the Islands. Blocking all of Albania-Mobile is easy to do, your customers don’t call there. Blocking all of Jamaica- Mobile is a non-starter.

Secondly, the Caribbean is covered by the North-American Numbering Plan so the destinations don’t appear to be international calls. They follow the same one plus area code dialling pattern as Canada and the United States. Thus for end customers and their PBX’s, they may not have prepared for fraud from these numbers as they would have for other overseas calls.

Please be extra vigilant about protecting your networks and customers against this threat. The issue is being raised between carriers through international forums, but these discussions take time to bear fruit.

Filed Under: Fraud

Fraud Protection – Dial Plan Algebra

January 29, 2018 By Timo

AurorA has operated in the International Telecommunications market since 1994. Since that time the telecom landscape has evolved and transformed and the pace of change has accelerated. The liberalization and deregulation of telecoms since the 1990’s, the move to native Internet Protocol (VoIP) and the deployment of fiber optic networks spanning the globe have driven voice termination prices steadily downwards. Per Telegeography, the annual CAGR for International Telephony between 1983 and 2007 was 15%; if we now include Skype and other OTT apps international voice traffic is still growing over 15% per year. People still want to talk with friends, family and business associates overseas.

International Telecommunications has become a high volume, low margin industry. That is why we believe that you should trust your traffic to a partner who provides value beyond simply completing calls at “the lowest rate” via Least Cost Routing (LCR). That approach can actually cost you big time ! You want a partner who provides high quality service and is motivated in protecting you and your customers from fraud, because even a single money-losing event is one too many and can wipe away any per-minute savings in an hour.

There are numerous sophisticated telecom fraud schemes in the world. Some have been around for decades, others are new and improved. The estimated global telecom toll fraud is US$38 billion in losses per year. The CFCA, Communications Fraud Control Association, cites telecom fraud as the #1 fraud committed outpacing identity theft, IRS fraud and credit card theft.

What can we do to mitigate and minimize the losses to the criminal gangs and hackers ?
– Identify suspicious traffic
– Provide alerts
– Block the suspicious traffic (while ensuring customer doesn’t reroute call to next route on LCR)
– Maintain a database and continue to block previous identified fraudulent destinations
– Ensure a meticulous, accurate worldwide dial plan

Dial Plan ? How does my A to Z route guide help mitigate fraud exposure? Well let me go through the list and explain.

The global network carries hundreds of billions of voice minutes on an annual basis by wholesale carriers such as Tata, Orange, T-Systems etc. Using Big Data and AI, these carriers can detect suspicious call patterns and trends. Even with the size and complexity involved, this takes place in near real-time. Once detected, an alert is promptly sent to the affected customer.

At AurorA we go a step beyond that by pro-actively blocking the suspicious traffic stream immediately upon the alert (for all of our customers). Blocking, however, is only part of the solution. To keep your route guide from automatically going to the next choice, the proper non-routable ISUP/SIP release code is sent to indicate fraud blocked numbers so that it doesn’t just propagate through the route guide.

By maintaining a database of fraud events, we can also pro-actively block specific numbers/ranges where fraud has been detected before. Traffic is then monitored for any call attempts made to known fraudulent numbers as well as to any unallocated number ranges.

Calls to unallocated numbers may be fraud as well. A reseller may make a deal with the number range owner, usually in a low volume, high cost destination for exclusive rights to certain of these number ranges. Often they are called premium or “special” (see my post http://www.amitel.com/premium/ ) A regular report of call attempts made to blocked numbers can be a warning sign of criminals testing your network, to see if calls complete to their chosen fraudulent numbers.

The key is to ensure that your dial plan is constantly up-to-date with current worldwide numbering (updated weekly) and that you avoid using carriers that have a plethora of such premium or special number ranges on their dial plans. Further safety can come by pro-actively blocking high-rate destinations where you know that your end customer base has no call volume to.

Choose to use a quality, reputable carrier who you trust with your overseas calls.
If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us.

Also, thanks to Robert Benlolo of Tata whose expertise in this field provided me with guidance.

Filed Under: Fraud, Quality

Premium Numbers and Fraud

January 22, 2018 By Timo

AurorA has been in the International Telecommunications space since 1994. Route guides for terminating traffic used to be simple; there was a rate per country to terminate a call to a landline telephone and maybe, maybe a second rate to terminate a call to the new cellphones. There were less than 300 lines on the spreadsheet.

Now, there are carriers whose A-to-Z rate sheet can offer thousands of pricing codes; still the landline rate with perhaps some other routes to major cities and a breakout now for each mobile carrier in the country but there are also an increased amount of expensive premium rates that are a potential risk for fraud.

In Canada and the U.S. in the 1990’s there was an explosion in the use of 900 or 976 numbers to offer premium services at a high per minute call rate that would be charged to the caller on their phone bill. Examples included weather reports, psychic hot lines and especially adult (phone sex) chat lines. The high per minute rates could lead to large phone bills very quickly and scammers would use all kinds of tactics to get people to call these numbers as they would get a split of the revenue from the phone company for each call. Consumers and businesses smartened up and blocked 900/976 number and eventually the Internet came and killed that particular market.

Overseas countries still have premium numbers and they live on through various names; Special Services, Non-Geographic Numbers, Universal Numbers, Telematic Services. etc. These numbers are premium in that usually they are at least ten times the rate of normal termination. They can have some legitimate applications; for example non-geographic numbers refers to a remote number, not tied to a physical destination such as if I wanted a Cyprus number to ring to my cellphone when I was elsewhere so my Cyprus customers could reach me.

They can be used for darker purposes though, through a scam called International Revenue Sharing Fraud (IRSF). In IRSF, the carrier in the far end country that owns the number ranges, leverage blocks of numbers they own by applying higher rates and assigning them to resellers outside of the country. Then hackers obtain these numbers, attack PBX’s and IP PBX’s and then machine generate calls. They then share the burst of revenue generated with the carrier in the country that owned these numbers providing a quick source of cash.

So how can you protect yourself ? It comes down to your own dial plan. You want to make sure that you don’t allow access to any premium numbers with such creative names like those listed above. Secondly , when choosing what international carrier to use to terminate your traffic with, beware of those whose own dial plans are riddled with such premium ranges, even if they seem to have low rates otherwise. It may be an arbitrage ambush. If they have many more premium pricing breakouts that do not exist on other carriers rate sheets you should avoid them. It doesn’t take many calls to the premium numbers to swamp any anticipated savings from using their “low” per-minute rates.

Choose to use a quality, reputable carrier for who you trust with your overseas calls.
Don’t be like those people in the photo when your bill comes in.
If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us.

Also, thanks to Robert Benlolo of Tata whose expertise in this field provided me with guidance.

Filed Under: Fraud, International, Quality

Satellite Phones

January 15, 2018 By Timo

The most expensive destinations on any A-to-Z wholesale rate sheet are almost always satellite phone networks. Depending on the satellite network and its design, they can be used to provide voice, text and low bandwidth Internet access in specific regions or the entire Earth including Antarctica and the North Pole.

Satphones are ideal for certain applications; on board ships and airplanes, for remote resource industries such as mining, oil and gas exploration, natural disaster recovery scenarios and they are very popular on expeditions into wilderness areas where terrestrial cellular service is unavailable. Government agencies and militaries also find them quite useful.

Traditional satellite networks are based on satellites in geostationary orbit, which are meant to remain in a fixed position in the sky relative to an observer on Earth. Geostationary satellites are 35,786 km above sea level so there is a noticeable delay when talking over them as the signal has to go up to the satellite and then back down. Examples would include Inmarsat and Thuraya.

There are also satellite networks that rely on a constellation of satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to provide worldwide coverage including the polar regions. The LEO satellites orbit the earth at altitudes of only 640 to 1120 km so their delay is negligible and goes unnoticed during a call. Examples would include Globalstar and Iridium.

These networks show up on wholesale A-to-Z rate sheets because satellite phone are issued with their own special country codes.

Inmarsat has been issued with codes +870 designated SNAC for Single Network Access Code. Prior to 2008 there were separate codes for geographic regions such as the Pacific Ocean, Indian Ocean, and Atlantic Ocean East and West). Inmarsat was originally created to provide a communications network for the maritime community. Inmarsat now has a variety of services beyond the strictly maritime such as Aeronautical (for aircraft obviously), BGAN (IP based Broadband Global Area Network), M2M for machine to machine applications such as IoT. Other services such as B, M and Mini-M were closed Jan 2017.

LEO systems that provide global coverage are issued virtual country code +881. Iridium satphones have country codes +881 6 and +881 7. Globalstar is allocated +881 8 and +881 9. Calls to both networks can be very expensive, thus it is possible to call them with charges reversed (i.e. paid by the satphone customer) by first dialling a number in the USA. That way the receiver pays the standard rate for satellite to landline calls , but the caller only pays for the domestic USA call.

Smaller regional satellite phone networks are allocated numbers in the +882 code range designated for “international networks”.

Finally, the voice codecs used in satphones have very aggressive voice compression due to the limited bandwidth. The sound quality will exhibit a clipping effect. Satphones use far less bandwidth than a 3G cellphone or a G.729 IP call. Thus it is even more imperative to access these numbers with as high quality a connection as possible to maximize the intelligibility of the speech.

If your business or commercial customers require operating in remote regions of the globe, away from cellular networks (which would include most of Canada !) then have them consider satphones and then route their traffic via AurorA’s premium connections for maximum quality.

Filed Under: International, Satellite

Six Sigma Telecom (or why Quality is paramount over cost)

January 7, 2018 By Timo

Over the holidays I was able to catch up on some reading. The book I finished was “Eccentric Orbits – The Iridium Story” by John Bloom. In a future post I plan to give a short review of this book and a few other books on telecom that I have recently enjoyed.

Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story

One of the items that struck me in the book was the description of the Six Sigma management philosophy pioneered by Motorola (the builder of the Iridium constellation of satellites) in the 1980’s that was famously adopted by Jack Welch and General Electric in the 1990’s. The focus on Six Sigma is on eliminating defects and reducing variability. It takes its name from statistics, sigma being the term for a standard deviation from a normal distribution.

In layman’s terms Six Sigma can be summed up as “…if you build things that don’t break, you don’t have any costs of fixing them later…”.

This is the central philosophy we have at AurorA and it resonated strongly with me. In our view the concept of Least Cost Routing (LCR) for international voice traffic is outdated, ultimately more expensive and leads to substandard business outcomes. Choosing the highest quality termination, i.e. a direct route that passes true Calling Line ID (CLID), actually leads to better value and over a longer period of time, higher revenue and lower overall total costs.

Direct costs are lower if you choose premium quality over a cheaper but lower quality route. The LCR way will lead to call failures and trouble tickets. Customers will complain.The cost of chasing trouble tickets can be substantial as well as the re-routing necessary until the faulty route is fixed. Customer service staff to take the calls and service technician costs will increase. These costs can quickly eat up the lower rate per minute of the cheap route.

Secondly, only a small percentage of customers that experience poor quality or call failures will actually complain and take the time to put in trouble tickets. The silent majority will simply stop using your service and use an alternative. They will, however, complain internally to their management team about the poor experience.

Top-line revenue will then also decline over time, initially from customers not using your sub-quality voice service, but further once your organization develops a reputation for poor quality. The maxim “How you do one thing is how you do everything” describes that phenomenon. Customers will not renew, or would look more favourably on competitors offerings. One poor niche allows a competitor an advantage and an avenue to exploit.

This is especially true if your customers are enterprise or business customers. Commercial customers demand excellent quality from your entire service offering. International voice termination may be only a small fraction of your portfolio but if they cannot rely on the calls completing each time, every time with superb “pin drop” audio quality than it would reflect poorly on the rest of your service offering.

This is why at AurorA we insist upon serving you with the highest quality, premium international voice termination. The Six Sigma philosophy highlights that the penny pinching of using a LCR is not worth it, and over the long run higher revenues and lower costs accrue from providing superior quality service to your customers.

Filed Under: International, Quality

Remain Vigilant over the Holidays

December 22, 2017 By Timo

It is an unfortunate fact that the fraudsters of the world like to plan their attacks on holidays when network supervision may not be at its highest.

Please remember to be vigilant this Holiday season and guard access to your switches.

AurorA has to deliver any traffic that is sent to it , so you are responsible for any unauthorized access to your network. AurorA will pass on any alerts that it gets of suspicious traffic patterns. AurorA has also implemented automatic blocking of B numbers once we detect a suspicious fraudulent traffic pattern in an attempt to minimize losses. In the New Year I will highlight on this blog other steps that we have taken such as the weekly reports of suspicous call attempts, revamped dial plan and intensified focus on high quality terminating routes.

Have a safe and happy Holiday season, and to those celebrating, Merry Christmas !

Timo Vainionpaa

Filed Under: Fraud

Start up week – Oct 5 to 10

October 5, 2015 By Timo

Today marks the start of Start-up week in Ireland. Ireland has done an impressive job of attracting established Silicon Valley companies to establish their European headquarters in the Emerald Isle. They have now set their sights on establishing themselves as an innovation hub by 2020.

I flew into Dublin on Saturday to join my partner, Ben Maguire for Start-Up week. The week-end was for adjusting for jet lag, getting caught up, watching some football and WorldCup rugby. Here is Ben in front of the local Dundalk Enterprise Ireland office where we have started talks

Sunday was a bright, warm sunny day and we toured around Dundalk, home of the FAI champion Lilywhites (who will be playing in the FAI Cup final again this year against Cork City !) and we finished up at the Spirit Store for some Guiness and traditional Irish music.

spirit store

It was wonderful and reminded me of the céilidh parties in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland back in Canada. All ages we are at the pub, players joined in the fun, adding their guitars, flutes, fiddles and accordians to the mix. The jovial atmosphere had us making new friends and reconnecting with old, including the former trombone player of the Benny Maguire All-Stars orchestra !

Today we are off to Dublin as we are booked in the Silcon Stroll. Looking forward to meeting some Irish start-ups and seeing how the entrepreneurial culture here compares and contrasts with Waterloo and the Bay Area. Follow us along on twitter @TimoVainionpaa

Filed Under: Doing business in Ireland, International

The Pros and Cons of Doing Business in Ireland

July 18, 2015 By Timo

This was published on the IrishCentral website on April 16, 2015

Stephen Mullan, vice president of emerging business at the IDA (Industrial Development Agency) Ireland, outlined some of the advantages that Ireland offers to businesses.

“Ireland is an ideal entry point for businesses seeking access to the European Union and its population of more than 300 million people. Businesses with operations in Ireland benefit from barrier-free access to the EU’s 28 member countries and its four freedoms – free movement of goods, capital, services, and people,” Mullan said.

More than 1,000 multinational companies have chosen Ireland as their strategic European base. The Emerald Isle has one of the world’s lowest nominal corporate tax rates, 12.5 percent for active businesses.

Other advantages are its predominately young workforce, with a median population age of 35 – the lowest in the EU – and a higher percentage of post-secondary graduates than the U.S. or the U.K.

However, Mullan cautioned that there must be “a legitimate business reason” for wanting to locate in Ireland.

“The country’s low corporate tax rate should be among the considerations–but cannot be the sole reason,” he said.  Business seeking to be considered for financial incentives must satisfy the IDA that the assistance is necessary to ensure the establishment or development of the operation and that it is both commercially viable and will provide new employment.

Read the full article here at
http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Pros-and-Cons-of-Doing-Business-in-Ireland.html

Filed Under: Doing business in Ireland, International