Blowing the Lid Off LIDB

The SS7-based line information database (LIDB) is evolving to fill a unique role in the multinetwork world. Whether giving service providers of all stripes access to each other’s line information for billing and validation, or acting as an authorization mechanism for IP services, LIDB will answer the call.

LIDB was conceived to verify the ownership of facilities and billing information — validating collect calls, calling card calls and third-party billed calls. Because LIDB takes information from the network service order stream — and maps billing information, names and addresses to the telephone number, along with who owns the phone number — it’s a repository of accurate customer information that also is used to enable features like caller ID and *69, along with intercarrier settlement and call intercept queries.

“We now see that LIDB needs to make some changes to care for the fact that VoIP providers are showing up and getting large,” says Paul Brady, director of product marketing for AT&T Diversified Group, a LIDB owner. “Operators need to get queries out of the VoIP world, without making them form-fit to the SS7.”

VoIP and cellular providers now can access most LIDB databases — to find out whether the call in question involves a PSTN number, and who owns the facilities and should be billed — thanks to front-end interface systems. But that doesn’t happen in the reverse. So, for now, service providers often are flying blind unless they have an interconnection agreement in place with the VoIP provider originating or terminating the traffic.

For instance, SECURUS Technologies Inc., a service provider for prisons that uses LIDB to manage fraud and bad debt, is losing money because it can’t query VoIP numbers. “As LECs update the database, we know when a customer has been ported, and we control the routing of calls to maximize billing,” says Dennis Rose, manager of validation operations and billing operations table management at SECURUS. “But to do that we need to know who terminates that traffic, and VoIP is a problem for us because right now we can’t tell if someone is calling from a VoIP number. We need to know that this is a VoIP customer, so we can build those relationships to bill that call.”

FCC rules mandate how VoIP providers send traffic to existing networks, says Kimberly Russo, vice president of sales and marketing at Tele-Tech Services Inc., a database provider of call waiting, routing and jurisdictional information, “but there’s no way to ID which calls are IP-originated, so service providers have their hands tied.” What’s needed, she says, is one resource for matching CDRs against data sets, via the 10-digit LIDB.

Also, many carriers lack interoperability agreements with VoIP providers and need a way to manage the relationships, says Doug Hilmes, director of business development and strategy at database provider Syniverse Technologies Inc. “Say you have a telco and a VoIP provider, and the telco doesn’t want to peer with the VoIP provider because it’s sending traffic over the telco network for free; therefore the VoIP provider is blocked from delivering a message via SIP, and has to use the PSTN. There needs to be a way to identify who is who to enable this traffic.”

Accudata already has signed on one provider to the VIDB, with a second as a tentative yes. “The impetus for them to provide us the data is that we share our revenue with them that we get on using their data,” explains Smith. To further attack fraud, cross-referencing to the SS7 LIDB then would be possible.

AT&T DG is on the same path. “We’re also seeing a unique need to identify VoIP carriers, and we’re working on a means to do that via LIDB,” says Brady. “We do a lot of work with billing aggregators, and they want to know who owns the number so they can accurately bill the access charges and the interconnects. There’s also a need for the rest of the carrier community — the IXCs, LECs, RBOCs and so on — to identify VoIP carriers and numbers for billing purposes. Are they still behind the CLECs or not? Who ultimately owns the number?”

Brady adds that building such a database will be embraced by VoIP providers eventually. “VoIP carriers get their numbers via the CLECs, typically. Over time, they will want ownership of those resources themselves, and will need to manage it. We do have vehicles for them to store numbers and make information available to the communications world.”

LIDB also has a role in authorizing next-generation services. And, as more items can be billed to a phone bill, the telephone number could become a secure validation method in and of itself. “In the future, we will use LIDB to support other types of end-user validation, for content and Internet transactions paid for via the phone bill,” says Brady. “People can use it as an ID to validate that end user and phone number, which are tied together in LIDB.”

As VoIP, mobility and IP data services continue to grow, providers are trying out different compensation models, such as IP peering, and enabling multi-application routing with ENUM, particularly as flat-rate packages become prevalent. But there is still a role for LIDB.

ENUM is a set of protocols that convert and map telephone numbers to IP addresses, URLs, mobile numbers, IM clients, e-mail addresses and more. In essence, it transforms the telephone number into a universal personal identifier that can be used across many different devices and applications.

Such accounts become especially difficult to authorize when it comes to peer-to-peer services and mobile applications (which make up the bulk of ENUM-enabled services) and as more people take their communications with them across several devices, porting their services around via a password. “Ironically, the VoIP peering fabric for multiple applications is mostly used today by non-VoIP devices, like mobile handsets routing multimedia messages,” says Tom Kershaw, vice president of next-generation networks at LIDB owner VeriSign Inc. “The total VoIP penetration in North America is still only around 4 to 5 million. By the end of next year there will be several hundred million devices using ENUM, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find VoIP in there.”

So while ENUM allows operators to route traffic efficiently across multiple network types, LIDB functionality is critical to prevent ID and address theft and password fraud. A VoIP-inclusive LIDB can match billing, address and other identifying information to the ENUM registration, acting as an authorization tool and providing operators with a whole host of information, such as what carrier owns the number, whether it’s been ported, calling party name and so on.

ENUM also enables VoIP peering, which ties VoIP “islands” together, thereby allowing companies to bypass the PSTN completely. However, successful VoIP peering efforts involve knowing on whose network the traffic is at any given moment, another functionality “VoIPed-up” LIDB could offer.

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