Phil, I had some difficulty interpreting your statements and requirements in the upstream post, so I shared it with several individuals and the following is the consensus.
You stated:
>>"At my company (a nationwide data service company a la PSI, Frontier etc), we're deploying a large (60,000 port) wholesale dial platform and having a lot of success pre-selling ports."<<
Where, what perspective, are you offering the service from? Are you using resold copper or PRIs from the customers' locations directly to your switch? Are you bypassing the incumbent, in other words? Are you a tandem office, being fed from Class 5s? Tandem and IXC class services? All of the above? Please expand on this.
You appear to be mixing several concepts. The IMT, or Inter-machine Trunk, is merely a dedicated link set up between switching entities, independent of pricing that you will be forced to incur for SS7 services. You appear to be confusing the two, or blending them into a single consideration. Correct me if I'm mistaken here.
In recent years, it's become very clear that some service providers, particularly the newer ones, are achieving huge savings by utilizing inexpensive CLEC T1s and PRIs for a variety of uses that were previously provided by the ILECs. In some instances, in order to save on intrastate toll routes, providers have leased out-of-state DS1s, and reflected them back in state once the switching was achieved out of region, in order to leverage the large discrepancies that exist between intra vs inter state offerings.
Back-hauling, and out-of-region switching to effect local call completions, in effect, have become favored practices for this reason. Some calls are being routed over many thousands of miles, in order to achieve a few points in savings, where volume discounts to a single point justify it.
As an aside, and as a means of demonstrating what I'm referring to, there is the classic case where a call made from France to the UK is more cheaply constructed if it routes through NY first, than if it goes by way of the Chunnel.
A meaningful discussion on the use of IMTs would require that you provide more architectural and business-objective information than you have, thus far. You don't want to do that here, I'm sure.
In any carrier modeling that you do, you must have at least a half dozen basic call profiles that you would be designing for, in the way of differnt user calling scenarios. I don't know what your particulars are, so I can't comment with any specificity what makes sense for you.
IMTs allow the carrier to escape usage sensitive networking in favor of fixed price offerings, stuffing everything you can onto the pipe for a single price. A carrier will keep traffic confined to these IMTs where they have sufficient traffic density to warrant the investment for permanent links. Otherwise, they will hop off their own net and jump onto someone else's for that part of the call that strays in that direction.
Assuming you have IMTs in place, the more you stuff them, the lower the cost per minute to you will be, obviously. If you can't stuff them sufficiently to incur a savings, then you elect use someone else's, leaving most of the SS7 headaches to them as well.
The SS7 comes into play in establishing the links needed for the PSTN. As far as you've indicated so far, all you want to do is build connections and tear them down. Right? These require ISUP parameters to be set. As soon as you begin offering enhanced services, then TCAP comes into play. Are you going to be offering TCAP dependent services?
As you already know, SS7 pricing schedules are different from IMTs. There are third party vendors who are available to handle SS7, although their costs may be quite high. In addition to providing you with the A-links that you will require, they should also be in a good position to offer any assistance you may require in navigating with other providers on a consulting basis. Illuminet is one such SS7 provider, and there are others. Which one are you using?
From a business perspective it takes some considerable planning and not an insignificant amount of financing to put a nationwide network together.
I don't know if I've hit or even come close to all the points. These are the ones that jump out at me as significant. Some CLECs may also offer these services. If you want to PM me more detail, maybe I will be able to provide you with more assistance.
Regards, Frank Coluccio
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