Local Number Portability: More than half of the landline and wireless phone numbers in service in the United States and Canada have been ‘ported’, that is, the current service provider is different than the carrier which originally issued the telephone number. In order to know how to route phone calls to the current carrier of record, each dialed phone number must be looked up in the local number portability database to determine the current carrier of record and the local routing number (‘LRN’, a ten digit phone number, of which the first six digits identifies the switch to hand the call off to). The LRN is also used in reconciling access charges, reciprocal compensation charges and in auditing of carrier bills. For these billing related uses it is important to maintain the porting history of a telephone number by date. Cloud Stream Communications provides multiple solutions tailored to your requirements.
- Transaction based solution
This is a real-time transaction based solution where the carriers switch fabric sends SS7/TCAP or SIP INVITE messages to either the SS7 Controller Point Codes or the IPv4 public addresses managed by the Session Controllers (all in Converged SCPs operated by Cloud Stream Communications). The response message is either a properly formatted AIN 0.1/0.2 SS7/TCAP message containing the LRN or is a SIP 3XX message using either a Contact header or an SDP payload to return the LRN and flag the call as having been LNP dipped.
- GUI query solution
Cloud Stream Communications provides several different implementations of this solution. First, there is a server based Perl/Javascript application that requires a user ID and password and which accepts one query at a time. The input arguments are a ten digit telephone number and optionally an ‘as of date’. This application works with IE, FireFox and Chrome. Cloud Stream Communications also provides an embeddable vb.net application which can be resident in the customer’s Windows Server IIS and which takes the same input arguments as the Perl/Javascript application.
- GUI/Online Batch/FTP solution
In addition to handling one query at a time through a GUI interface, this solution also supports online batch processing of up to 20,000 queries at a time. For larger batches, there is an FTP site where the user can upload batch files. Processing is continuous and each user account is configured with an e-mail notification such that when a batch has been processed an e-mail is sent to the user with identifying batch information. Batches are limited in size to ten million records per file. Input arguments are the same as for ‘GUI query solution’.
- Customer hosted solution
Cloud Stream Communications provides a physical server running either of Windows Server 2008R2/SQL Server 2008 or CentOS 6.2/MySQL 5.1. Loaded in the database is a copy of the LNP database and the stored procedures to perform LNP lookups. Updates to the database are applied once a day in the maintenance window. The server and the LNP data remain the property of Cloud Stream Communications.
- SCP hosted solution
If the customer has a third party SCP or STP that supports LNP transactions, Cloud Stream Communications can provide the LNP data to support the application in the SCP or STP platform. The LNP data remains the property of Cloud Stream Communications.