Dublin-based wholesale billing and routing specialist iCONX has re-confirmed its total compliance with new and complex rating scenarios created by the sudden and recent proliferation of “Origination Surcharges” (sometimes referred to as “Anumber billing”) in the carrier voice-termination marketplace.

Under this growing trend, EU carriers have increasingly started to apply two (and in some cases more) alternative prices against a single destination, with each price linked to the origination route or country.

In such scenarios, an unchanged or existing price might apply for traffic originating from within the EU, but for all traffic originating outside the EU, a surcharge – often heavy – is applied.

This has created great turbulence for existing partner agreements, with a business requirement to pass on, in turn, those additional costs to partners. But, chief amongst the challenges, is the inability of many – if not most – of the outmoded interconnect billing systems still in use to cope with the changes in their rates management architecture, rating processes, invoicing, and settlement.

“Carriers need to very quickly adapt to these surcharges at the wholesale level – whether that be for national termination, or for international surcharges for transiting this traffic type”, explained Sacha Jones, Head of Product & Delivery at iCONX. “Traditionally interconnect charges have been applied by looking up the destination (Bnumber) only – but these surcharges now require an additional lookup of the originating destination (Anumber) to determine if the call originated inside or outside the EU.”

Sacha continues : “Many carriers who lack a rating solution for handling these surcharges are suffering at the margin level, while they assess how to adapt existing interconnect systems.”

All iCONX customers are seamlessly coping with these Origination Surcharges, requiring only standard rate and code updates to implement the more complex rate structures.

In use since 2001, and with continuous development to ensure compliance with all subsequent market innovations to the present day, the core rating engine within iCONX was originally designed to handle origination surcharges exactly like these. This flexible rating architecture was built many years ago, in order to meet (for instance) highly challenging EBC requirements within the UK market.

In use since 2001, and with continuous development to ensure compliance with all subsequent market innovations to the present day, the core rating engine within iCONX was originally designed to handle origination surcharges exactly like these. This flexible rating architecture was built many years ago, in order to meet (for instance) highly challenging EBC requirements within the UK market.

Sacha confirmed : “Without any need of customisation, the standard iCONX system can easily be configured to rate on any combination of origination (Anumber) and destination (Bnumber) rates. Dealing with the new rate structure is simplicity itself.”

Initially, observers believed the “dual MTR” innovation might be a passing fad. However, since the change was first approved in France by the European Commission, other countries have followed suit over the past 9-12 months, including Italy, Greece, Portugal, Czech Republic, Croatia and Hungary – and more are expected as the tempo grows.

Opinion varies regarding the reasons behind this unorthodox development.

“Generally speaking, carriers will exploit whatever opportunity they can to improve margin, following the recent pattern of thinner margins and downwards regulatory pressure onto MTRs. However, this goes beyond that.” Sacha continues : “EU carriers for years have suffered high termination rates to non-EU destinations, yet those non-EU counterparts have benefitted from lower and lower rates in the other direction”

As part of the challenge to the French regulatory body last year, the authority of EU regulators to enforce rates concerning non-EU carriers was effectively disproved. Hence, carriers have exploited their freedom to set such rates at a level of their choosing

Something of a “domino-effect” is also observed, whereby as soon as one carrier introduces it, its country counterparts are all but obliged to follow suit.

Don’t be caught out! Please contact us at sales@iconxsolutions.com should you like to speak to us further on this topic.