The past few weeks, we’ve dedicated the Bank of Telecom (BoT) blog to our telecoms trading platform, which facilitates the buying and selling of SMS and voice routes. This includes: 

• 1,600+ voice interconnects operating across 130+ countries. 
• 250+ SMS interconnects, with direct optimal delivery and minimal latency, across hundreds of prime destinations worldwide. 
• A suite of value-added services that help our customers improve revenue and guarantee quality connectivity experiences. 

This week, we turn our attention to this last point, homing in on the services that set our solution apart from the field. We’ll be answering the following questions: 

1. What are value-added services (VAS)?
2. What value-added services does Bank of Telecom offer? 

Talk to our experts to learn more about Bank of Telecom! 

What are value-added services (VAS)? 

In the telecommunications industry, the term value-added services — or VAS for short — refers to services that are supplemental to a core offering. Typically, this is achieved either by making an offering more appealing to prospective customers, or by driving existing customers to use and engage with an offering more frequently. 

For instance, the core offering of a mobile network operator (MNO) is voice calling; missed call alerts, however, are a VAS. They’ve just become more common since they’re easy to provide and, at this point, no MNO wants to be the one that doesn’t provide missed call alerts. 

SMS and MMS are in the same boat. As we mentioned in a previous blog post, SMS was initially used as a way for service providers to communicate with their subscribers — for service notifications, network-related alerts, and eventually marketing promotions. However, because of the recent flourishing of SMS as a global communications tool, most MNOs have stopped treating SMS as a VAS and have instead enshrined it as a core service. 

Indeed, competition in the telecommunications space is heated; and consequently, the VAS offered by MNOs and other service providers have never been more resplendent. T-Mobile for instance is offering Netflix as a bonus to their Magenta Family Plan subscribers. Not too shabby. 

Still, one should not limit their imagination to the B2C market. While the dark ages of the telecommunications industry were replete with government run service providers and onerous regulations that failed to encourage healthy markets, things over the past 10-15 years have liberalized significantly. More and more, countries are opening cellular networks up to private industry, leading to the creation of new businesses with innovative mobile services and offerings. 

For example, Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) and Mobile Virtual Network Aggregators (MVNAs) have made a killing repackaging network access, simultaneously helping MNOs boost revenue and delivering more affordable, accessible mobility services to the market. As such, many MNOs are looking to leverage value-added services to attract entrepreneurial telecommunications businesses to their networks. 

What value-added services does Bank of Telecom offer? 

For our part, we at BoT provide a suite of VAS designed to create a trustworthy trading environment. Indeed, our solutions are geared towards assuring the best quality voice and SMS routes at the best possible rates. They are as follows: 

• Global rate checker: We collate all CLI and NCLI rates from our partners onto a single platform. This makes it possible for us to cross-reference global rates in a matter of seconds, ensuring competitive pricing. 
• Destination Monitoring and Reporting: This includes insight into… 

• Answer-Seizure Ratio (ASR) — The percentage of telephone calls that are successfully connected out of all attempted calls. Also referred to as call completion rate, this is an important metric for understanding network quality and call success rates. 

• Post Dial Delay (PDD) — The delay between when a number has been dialed and when the phone begins to ring. 
• Delivery Reporting (DLR) — A report that confirms an SMS has been successfully delivered. 
• Calling Line Identity (CLI) — This is another term for Caller ID. It refers to the method by which inbound calls can be associated with the individual or business making the call. 
• False Answer Supervision (FAS) — This refers to the fraudulent scenario in which the answer signal of a call is modified to charge for non-conversational time.  

• CLI and NCLI Voice Testing: Run destination reports showing FAS, PDD, and CLI. Receive an audio file with NCLI tests. 

• Voice Traffic Cleansing: Improve stats and increase quality and sales by preventing bad calls on your voice routes. 
• Voice Transcoding: Voice transcoding helps build traffic volumes and revenue. With voice transcoding, customers can ensure all calls are transcoded to compatible codecs, thus improving their ASR value. 
• Home Location Register (HLR) Lookup: An HLR is a database that contains information about the mobile subscribers of a particular mobile network. This includes mobile numbers, services, whether the numbers have been ported to another network. 
• Direct and Wholesale SMS Testing: Test any direct and wholesale route by selecting sender ID type, SMSC, SMS type, and DLR. 

And, to top it all off, Bank of Telecom offers Same Day Settlements for all trades occurring on our platform. To learn more about Same Day Settlements, read our last post! 
 

About Internet Mobile Communications (IMC)
Trading under the Bank of Telecom brand, IMC provides a rich portfolio of voice, SMS, data, and international settlement services to the global carrier community. IMC developed, owns, and operates the Bank of Telecom, which carries billions of international minutes each year, across hundreds of routes from 1,600+ carrier interconnects in 130+ markets.