It’s a good policy to check your telecom expenses twice a year. Adding, cancelling or moving a circuit will affect your monthly recurring charges and should be verified. After you’ve worked through the monthly fees, spend some time to check your per-minute charges.
The SUMMARY BY TYPE OF CALL on your invoice clearly identifies the International, Interstate and Intrastate calls for Dedicated 1+, 8XX and switched service.
Dividing the Charge by the Minutes will give you the blended CPM for the Type of Call, but remember:
- Calls to Canada and some outlying areas will be grouped in with your Interstate usage and skew that average.
- Any variety of calls with a CPM more than a half-penny from your average should be investigated.
It would be easy to check your rates if you had a flat-rate plan. There are still some legacy customers who signed contracts years ago that haven’t been changed over to new rate decks, but, for the most part, flat-rate plans are a thing of the past. The level of consumer hardware sophistication, in combination with the move away from traditional land-lines to cell phones or VoIP provides service has made flat-rate plans unfeasible. The new rate decks available to large telecom customers generally fall into the categories of either LATA-Tier or LATA-OCN.
When you signed up with ATI, you were given a review of your CDR and a projected CPM for your usage. The CPM is influenced by many factors, to include:
Geographic Locations called
Interstate to Intrastate call ratio
Percentage of LNP'ed numbers called
International usage
Directory Assistance calls
Customers that market to different states and different locations every month can see a noticeable change in their average CPM. If you have a consistent calling profile, you can expect a somewhat consistent blended CPM for your usage.
The average CPM you calculate on the summary section of your invoice is helpful, but in order to accurately validate rates, you must check at the individual call level. Your ATI invoice has 2 files, 1 being a printable .PDF that includes all the summaries and general information on your invoice, and a second file containing all of your Call Detail Records in .CSV format.
The .CSV file can be opened with Microsoft Excel if it has fewer records than the limitation of your version of Excel, or MS Access for larger files that are still under the 2 Gig limitation. Create a new column of data with the CPM for your calls, and then identify the type of call (Dedicated 1+ or Toll-free) by looking at the “Billed_Number” column (in our case Column J) and the Call Type column to the left of it.
The call types are:
- Interstate
- Instrastate
- International (including Alaska and Hawaii)
- Local
- IntraLATA
Determining if the CDR you are looking at is IntraState, InterState, and 1+ or 8XX will direct you to the correct rate deck to consult. Now that you’re looking at the right set of rates, you need to identify the LATA and OCN or LATA and Tier.
LATA and OCN are the easiest, and the first step in validating a rate, regardless of if you final rate deck is OCN or Tier based. The first step is to identify the dialed number and look it up at Local Calling Guide.
The first call is IntraLATA to Placentia, CA – phone number 714-597-9000. As we input 714 into the NPA box and 579 into the NXX box at the top of the site and click the Submit button, we get:
It is not uncommon for an Area Code and Prefix (NPA-NXX) to be split up even further, and this is a good example. The number dialed actually belongs to Royal Street Communications with an OCN of 899D in LATA 730, and not just the standard Pacific Bell (OCN 9740) that you’d find if you only looked at the NPA-NXX level.
If your rate deck is LATA/OCN, you now have all the information you need to locate the correct price on your rate deck. If your rates are LATA/Tier, you have one more step.
Every LATA/Tier rate deck has a code identifying which OCNs fall into which Tiers. There is generally a default as well, in the event that the OCN is not listed on the document. The ATI rate decks default to Tier 6 if the OCN is not listed.
REMEMBER: The data at Local Calling Guide only tells you who the block of phone numbers was issued to. It does not guarantee that the phone number you looked up still belongs to that carrier. A growing percentage of phone numbers are being ported away from their assigned carriers to new providers through a process called Local Number Portability. In this case, a phone number that appears to belong to Pacific Bell may have been migrated to COX Communications. ATI can assist you in this case by providing a supplemental CDR as often as once a quarter, allowing you to identify – both the phone numbers that were migrated, and the accurate OCN for their current provider.
