Minimizing Risk of Disputes Among Telecommunication Carriers With Blockchain Technologies

Introduction

VoIP technologies have gained significant role in the telecommunication industry. VoIP stands for Voice over IP and as its name suggests, voice detected by a microphone is sampled and converted to binary data which serve as the data portion of a network packet. These packets are then transmitted over an IP network to the end user who is taking part in the conversation (Chakraborty. et al. 2019).

Rather than using the PSTN/ISDN infrastructure to make phone calls, it is possible to set up calls and transmit the voice over the IP network. Given that no dedicated infrastructure is necessary to transmit the voice, the cost of a call is lower than what PSTN/ISDN providers have to offer. In the telecommunication business it has been taken advantage of this fact, and a global network of providers offer their services to route phone calls to the desired destinations.

Figure 1.

Simple call routing diagram

As shown in Figure 1, company A takes call requests from user A and routes them to company B, which “knows” how to terminate the call to user B.

In telecommunications, whoever starts the call is charged for it (not including roaming services). In such cases, company B charges company A, which in turn will charge user A. The billing takes effect only when the calls are answered and taking in consideration 1/1 billing increments, user A and company A will be charged for the number of seconds the call was in answered state. The price is obviously agreed beforehand between the communicating parties: Price-1 between user A and company A, and Price-2 between company B and company A (Swale and Collins 2013).

In real scenarios, company A can send millions of call requests to company B in the span of a month, and the billing needs to be precise. But this is not always the case. There are many occasions when companies raise disputes for unfair bills. Each call is attached a Call Detail Record (CDR). This piece of information contains all that is needed to calculate the cost of a call. It includes data such as the start, answer, end time of the call, its duration etc. Each company has its own set of CDRs for all the calls exchanged between them. This means that company A expects to be charged a certain amount of money for the traffic it has routed to company B on a given period. When the bill it receives from company B exceeds expectations, issues may arise and this process can lead to a formal dispute among both companies resulting in complex legal procedures with related significant costs for both companies.

When a dispute is raised there is a need to check in detail the traffic to figure out where the discrepancies reside. In many occasions, company B does not allow traffic towards it until the dispute is resolved and it closes the route. Also, company A would not want to send calls without knowing how they are being charged. They risk being charged more than they are charging user A, hence losing money on each call. For company B this means losing a customer for some time, which will lower its revenue and can lead to missing the business targets that have been set. Meanwhile, company A has one provider less for the traffic it receives from user A, and if it is a big amount of traffic, it can be difficult to find alternative routes.

To solve this problem in this paper the authors have considered the use of blockchain technologies. This technology would make sure that both parties have the same information on their CDRs, and that each call is charged with the same billing increment and at the same time. The price of the call differs based on its destination, so a price list is exchanged between companies containing the prices for each destination offered. So, the companies should store in a blockchain network the prices of each route and all CDRs. Through this approach, once the information is stored in the blockchain network, it becomes immutable and none of the parties can claim different values. This would avoid any kind of dispute among the Carriers as all billing information would be completely stored in the blockchain network and could be used by both billing teams to reconcile any discrepancy that they might find in their internal local billing systems. Effectively, once the data are stored in the network, there is no possibility that any Carrier finds different data locally leading therefore to a very safe and effective procedure for avoiding the risk of disputes.