The global market for mobile communications and mobile technologies is tremendous and growing rapidly.

Most services in our current wireless society are mobile based and Voice, Music Streaming, Financial, and Wellness services account for a large percentage of the world’s revenue spending: In 2018, Telecom services is projected to account for 1.6 Trillion USD. Music Services bring in well over 50 Billion world- wide. In the US alone, people spend over 2.5 trillion in health care and this does not account for the nutraceutical industry segment and other proactive wellness related sectors.

There is a large opportunity to create private label products and services and offer those products and services to end consumers.

Unified Signal Solution: Unified Signal has deployed a full turnkey billing system and support ecosystem that enables any company in any industry to become a reseller of telecom, financial services, music streaming, and wellness services. In development since March of 1998, the company has used feedback from over 150 clients to refine its product and create a platform that provides core services enablement functionality that rivals any service enabler in the industry. Unified Signal’s proprietary turnkey back office infrastructure allows its clients to sell, provision, fulfill, and care for multiple services, including Pre and Post-Paid wireless, home telephone, Wi-Fi / VoLTE backhaul, Internet, IoT, Long Distance, financial services such as mobile wallet and prepaid debit card, and wellness services. The system is completely rules based, which allows for much greater speed of integration and customization than any competitor. Unified Signal can onboard clients in only 3-4 weeks and for minimal startup costs. Unified Signal’s software infrastructure has activated over 2 million customers over the last 19 years and currently rates millions of call records per day.

Unified Signal is uniquely positioned at the center of a true service enablement convergence by being a system that can support a wide variety of services all combined on one convergent and private label bill. Unified Signal’s mission is to automate any and all carrier / supplier functions of which traditionally are very manual and costly. Unified Signal is the first services enabler that has automated subscriber activations and management for all product and services across many different service sectors. What once took 8-15 minutes to provision a customer and an army of people to manage that customer, now takes 8-10 seconds with no human intervention needed. Unified Signal’s level of automation dramatically increases the profitability for its clients and more importantly dramatically increases customer satisfaction by virtually eliminating billing errors and other back office issues that have plagued the billing industry over the last 20 years.

Unified Signal was founded by former executives of some of the largest telecommunications carriers in the country as well as senior Microsoft executives. This dichotomy of talent has allowed the company to focus on a solution that would fill the gaping hole in the billing space for a cost effective, fully automated, customizable billing system to support the resale of all types of services from activation through customer service.

Due to the cost efficiencies created over the last 19 years of development, Unified Signal can implement a new client for a fraction of the cost of competing systems providing higher margins to the client, allowing them to offer more competitive pricing and easily expand into additional services and still using one ubiquitous operating platform. The Unified Signal system provides its clients with all the tools necessary to manage and grow their service business including: carrier activations, identity verification, product procurement and fulfillment, rating and billing, customer service, strategic and tactical reporting, taxation, supplier wholesale bill QA, and a feedback / development loop that helps clients keep their offering on the cutting edge of technology. In addition, our consulting side of the house helps create rate plans, branding and logos, marketing materials and helps to procure and provision inventory. Unified Signal also offers an internal highly trained customer service team to support its clients with a private label care platform.

Billing System (BSS / OSS) Technical Systems Overview

Unified Signal has chosen to build and deploy its own BSS/OSS system which has now recently been deployed on the AWS cloud. Unified Signal’s framework is designed to be extremely flexible, reliable, scalable, and secure providing rapid development utilizing common class libraries and built-in security and logging. The foundation of the system is built on .NET Framework 4.0, written in C#, connecting to a powerful Sequel Server database. Unified Signal’ front end interface are highly compatible with applications that are built with other technologies or applications that are hosted on other networks by providing multiple integration methods including framing and API integration.

Solution Stack

The solution stack includes an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider that delivers a reliable virtualization offering that includes a secure facility, reliable hardware, networking and 24/7 support. The software stack includes MS SQL Servers in a cluster, replicated or standalone instances, multiple Web servers configured with round robin load balancing and one or more application servers based on the load for the instance being implemented.

Application Auditing and Access Control

Each application within the system has the capability for auditing and security processes to be attached to it. The security level (1 thru 10) and department of the employee determines the availability of the application for the user. Each time the user accesses the application, whether authorized or not, an audit trail from the user is logged in the system, including date/time, IP Address, and permission ID (unique to user). This database table has triggers and permission set up to track and prevent tampering (direct access to the table).

Token Authentication

Tokens are generated for each logged in user, which tracks the role of the user and time of the session. This best practice technique is used to ensure that unauthorized access is not gained into the system by session tampering.

Encryption Management

Encryption is done in a secure manner where no encryption keys are stored in clear text on the Web or Application servers. A strategy of double encryption has been taken in lieu of utilizing a hardware encryption module. A hardened database which stores the keys for encrypting and decrypting should only be accessible by dual authentication by two database administrators. The encryption keys stored in the hardened database are encrypted (double encryption), which is decrypted by the keys on stored on the Web or Application server configuration files. This method ensures that no encryption keys used to encrypt and decrypt customer data is stored in plain text or accessible by one individual.

Alerts

System exceptions that are created by applications are logged as system generated trouble tickets, which are assigned to IT personnel and can be emailed or sent via SMS. The Watch Dog processes are database scripts that monitor the data in the databases to ensure that the system is working logically and will provide notification to technical teams of any potential issue by creating trouble tickets.

Trouble Tickets

Trouble tickets created by clients, customers, and distributors and are monitored by a team of operations staff to ensure that the overall health of the application is optimal.

Rating & Reporting

The Rating application is designed to handle multiple types of file formats from different locations including locally delivered files or remote files on FTP servers. Reporting is managed on the application server and is designed to extract any type of information from the database that is needed by business analysts or partners. The reports that are generated can automatically be delivered to a partner’s secure FTP location on the application server. The rating and reporting applications are designed to be flexible and stable.

Scaling Horizontally

The Web Servers do not hold state for users, which makes it easy to scale the web front ends horizontally. Initiating additional Web Servers from back up VMs is a seamless is a way to build out the front end horizontally.

Horizontal scaling for the database servers can be accomplished by logically segregating Channels into separate SQL clusters. The application can support different database connection strings based on the unique host header of the client. For larger scale subscriber bases, a reporting server is added to house all of the reporting data in one system to support real time reporting. This is accomplished through a data warehouse, SQL Server replication and a database snapshot on a mirrored database.

Scaling Vertically

Adding additional hardware to the existing database or application servers is a painless way to improve performance. Simple enhancements like adding memory, faster storage or additional processors will improve performance significantly.

Hybrid Scaling

Taking the horizontal scaling approach along with a vertical scaling approach ensure that the system scales virtually unlimitedly. The hybrid strategy is essentially taking the best of each method and combining them into one. Each client can have their own cluster, several large clients can share one cluster (grouped cluster), many small to medium sized clients can share a cluster (grouped cluster), or a combination thereof. The exact approach can be preplanned prior to onboarding new clients. If anyone client becomes too large and is currently sharing a cluster with other clients, that large client can easily be migrated to its own cluster, which has been done many time in the past for large clients that have over 500,000 active customers.

Ultimately the front-end Web Servers only need to know the database connection for the cluster of the client, due to being stateless, which is easily provided via the configuration files along with the Host Headers passed to the Web Server. Additional enhancements are made to ensure that Transaction IDs are unique throughout all of the various clusters, which make troubleshooting and customer management an easier task. This is accomplished by having one small centralized database cluster which is the master for handing out IDs to the application. Each grouped SQL cluster can be scaled vertically before the need of a migration of specific clients to their own cluster. The system is also let up on AWS autoscaling which allows each clients frond end web servers to scale up or down based on demand.

Client Applications:

There are many industry segments and types of companies that could dramatically benefit from launching Unified Signal’s turn key private label solution. Below are a small set of industry sectors that we support.

Retail (Brick & Mortar / Online):

1. Sell standalone or bundle services to increase revenues and decrease churn to new and existing customers.
2. Use our Beacon / Communications suite to better communicate with your customers.
3. Use the company’s financial services module to virtually eliminate credit card processing fees and bad debt.
4. Use services as a retention program for unhappy customers.

Corporate America:

1. Corporate clients can use our payroll pay card program to pay W2 and 1099 employees and commissions
2. Control spending by reducing telecom costs by over 40%
3. Turn actual cost centers into a profit center
4. Increase employee productivity as people will no longer have to leave early on paydays to cash their payroll checks

Multi-Level Marketing Companies:

1. Pay customer or employee commissions world-wide automatically, in real-time, and for FREE.
2. New products and services to market
3. Use the company’s financial services module to virtually eliminate credit card processing fees and bad debt.

Wireless Carriers:

1. Allow clients to launch value added services like: Home telephone, music streaming, wellness services, and prepaid debit card with free international money movement providing them with a more competitive marketing advantage and decreased churn and increased profitability.
2. Launch Unified’s Wi-Fi / VoLTE calling suite
3. Launch Unified’s Beacon based platform to better communicate and market to its customers.

Government:

1. Armed Forces can use Unified Signal’s mobile commerce technology to better manage money back and forth to U.S. service man stationed around the world.
2. Social Security could be paid out on a prepaid debit card
3. Red Cross and other government aid agencies could pay out funds on a prepaid debit card
4. Ensure court ordered payments are carried out (child support / award settlements)

Charities:

1. Charities can use mDonate to create a very easy way for customers to donate money
2. Charities could use the product suite as a profit source
3. Allow Charities to communicate with their users when $$ is needed

Affinity Groups:

1. Allow groups or organizations the ability to add an additional profit center
2. Allow affinity groups to freely collect money from its members