"We know who you wanted to call"

SGA-Intelligent Call Assistant (SGA-ICA) is a new system designed to improve call connection success rates of inbound roaming subscribers. Since phone numbers are not always stored with the international prefixes in cellphones, connecting roamers' calls are often unsuccessful, and the subscribers simply get a signal or an announcement stating that the dialed number does not exist. For some cases it means lost calls, and in many cases subscribers also change the roaming operator and retry their calls over there. This problem, and hence the potential loss of operator's profit, can be eliminated by informing the subscriber about the error, and suggesting corrective actions.

Operating Principles

Utilizing the features of SGA-ICA the operator can inform the roaming subscriber in a text message about the proper dialing method. Since this message contains the correct number (with the proper prefixes) as well, the subscriber can easily initiate the call by extracting this number from the text (usually by simply pressing a single button of the phone on the message text).

 

In this way SGA-ICA allows the operator to provide helpful information for roamers dialing with inappropriate (or missing) prefixes. In order to do so, the operator should route such calls to the SGA-ICA on the basis of number analysis. The distinguishing features of these calls: foreign calling party number and unknown called party number.

Features

Beside sending information SMS to the subscriber in the language associated with his/her home service provider, SGA-ICA releases the call (after a short timeout) with a predefined release cause, compiles a call detail record (CDR), and logs the events at the preferred level of details. The system receives and terminates the call on SS7/ISUP protocol; for sending the short message either of the SMPP, UCP, or CIMD2 TCP/IP protocols can be used. In errorneous situations, the system generates alarms and sends them to the operator via SNMP. The system is able to handle and maintain real and virtual speech channels as well, so the hardware requirements of the system can significantly be reduced.

Hardware Configuration

The minimal hardware configuration consists of an industrial grade PC with an SGA-47 interface card inserted into an ISA extension slot; its software is also well optimized, hence not computationally intensive. These hardware and software requirements allow the operators to use various other SGA programs to run on the same PC. Application availability can be increased by system duplication, which is highly cost-effective for SGA-ICA, due to its minimal hardware requirements.

Configuration Made Simple

The system configuration starts with setting up the operator's network to route the calls in question to the SGA-ICA equipment. The configuration steps then include associating the network prefixes with languages and text message template-texts, defining the preferred release timeout and release cause, setting up alarm thresholds and the desired debug level - and that's all.