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“We know who you wanted to call”

SGA – Intelligent Call Assistant (SGA-ICA) is a new system designed to improve call connection success rate of inbound roaming subscribers. When phone numbers are not stored along with the international prefixes, connecting roamers' calls are unsuccessful, and these subscribers simply get a signal or an announcement stating that the dialed number is not valid or not in use.

 

It results in lost calls, and in many cases subscribers also change the roaming operator and retry their calls over there, which means loss of profit for the operator company and displeasure for the subscriber.

 

SGA-ICA system provides the key for solving the above problem: it informs the subscriber about the dialing error, and suggesting the corrective action will result in new calls, which in turn leads to direct increase of the roaming revenue for the mobile operator company.

Operating Principles

Utilizing the features of SGA-ICA the operator can inform the roaming subscriber in a text message (SMS) 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 simply clicking 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. The correct called number is subsequently determined by SGA-ICA, based on preset rules.

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, and then continues with 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.

Features

Beside sending SMS information 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 operator can also maintain a list about roaming partners that prefer not to provide this SMS service for their subscribers.

 

The system receives and terminates the call on SS7/ISUP protocol; the SigTran version is also available on request. For sending the short message either SMPP or UCP or CIMD2 protocols can be used. In erroneous 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 for the SS7 version or with an Ethernet interface for the SigTran version. The operating software is well optimized, hence little computation capacity is required, which allows the operators to run various other SGA applications on the same machine. Application availability can be increased by system duplication, which is highly cost-effective for SGA-ICA, due to its minimal hardware requirement