Christian Michaud, vice chair of the i3forum, said that the organisation is identifying five or six potential companies to carry out the research and wants to select a vendor in early 2019.
The information will be available to members and non-members of i3forum, but it will not be published, said Michaud (pictured), who is also a senior VP of Tata Communications.
“We want to go live from the second quarter of 2019, at least for voice services,” said Michaud, who was speaking in an i3forum briefing at Capacity Asia in Hong Kong today. Then the project will be extended to other services. “It will bring a lot of benefits to members and non-members,” he added.
Answering a question from Capacity, Michaud said the data collected would include “voice minutes, quality of service and revenue parameters, organised by destination”, as well as by mobile and fixed. “We would like to be more granular. It gives us a benchmark for the participants. It will be for the carriers. We don’t intend to publish the reports.”
Later, i3forum is hoping to create a global numbering database. This will involve assembling information from carriers, government agencies and aggregators, said Michaud. “The reality today is that the information is not there. Carriers have their own database and they have to update monthly. It’s a cost centre and it’s not efficient.”
A problem is that numbering information can be incomplete and different sources provide conflicting data, he explained. “We have 250 sources, 500 perhaps, and they’re in different formats.” Inconsistencies provide opportunities for fraudsters, he added.
