Both physical and virtual circuits play a critical role for mobile network operators (MNOs), enterprise organizations, IPX providers, data centers, and roaming partners. They are the backbone of their networks, linking core systems, data centers, and locations while enabling efficient traffic management, service differentiation, and rapid provisioning of services. In addition, they also provide secure, high-performance connections for mission-critical applications, while offering agility, redundancy, and the ability to adapt network resources to changing business needs. They continue to be foundational for delivering reliable, high-quality digital services.
While circuits are essential, managing them effectively is anything but simple. Businesses struggle with poor inventory records, disjointed asset management, and inconsistent vendor practices. These challenges make it difficult to track which circuits are provisioned and active, validate invoices against contracts, enforce service level agreements (SLAs), and resolve billing discrepancies. This often leads to cost overruns, inefficiencies, and disputes.
Let’s explore why circuits are vital, what makes managing them so complex, and the hidden costs of not addressing the challenges that exist. We will also set the stage for how organizations can take steps to simplify the complexity of circuit reconciliation and take control of circuit management.
Why is circuit management complex?
Managing circuits that carry signaling, voice, messaging, and data is much more complex than it may seem. Many organizations find the complexities within a tangled web of mismatched records, inconsistent processes, a lack of standardization, and time consuming, error-prone manual processes.
Organizations rarely rely on a single provider for their circuit needs, creating both redundancy and options in case a connection is broken. They might engage with a number of circuit vendors across multiple regions and countries, with each vendor having its own ordering, provisioning, and billing processes. Because of this, contracts with these vendors can vary widely, each with unique terms for capacity, pricing, SLAs, and penalties. This diversity makes it incredibly difficult to track and compare circuits consistently while ensuring compliance with all agreements.
The telecom industry also lacks agreed-upon standards for how circuits are named, documented, or invoiced. This can result in internal inventory IDs that often don’t match vendor circuit IDs or invoice references. Order numbers and contract identifiers on invoices may not correspond to records in internal systems. In addition, performance metrics or SLAs, capacity definitions, and billing formats might differ between vendors. This inconsistency causes financial teams to spend time manually sifting through records to understand what they’re being charged for.
Different teams within an organization, including finance and operations will use separate systems to manage circuit-related information. This creates an issue where one team may have one set of records for provisioning, while finance has another, and vendors have their own. These silos make it difficult to create a single source of truth for circuits, which undermines both operational efficiency and cost control.
The impact of poor circuit management
If circuit inventory, contracts, and vendor relationships are poorly managed, the implications can go beyond administrative headaches. Poor circuit management directly affects the bottom line, operational efficiency, and even customer experience.
Over time, circuits may be decommissioned, replaced, overlooked or unnoticed, especially when inventory records are incomplete or out of sync with vendor systems. Orphaned circuits or circuits that no longer carry any traffic might continue to appear on invoices. Redundant circuits can go unnoticed because nobody knows they exist. And organizations can be paying vendors for services they don’t actually use, month after month.
Monthly Recurring Charges (MRCs) and Non-Recurring Charges (NRCs) are two key components of circuit costs. MRCs billed by vendors may not reflect the agreed contract rates, leading to inflated recurring costs. NRCs, such as installation or upgrade fees, may appear unexpectedly or at incorrect amounts. What’s more, bandwidth adjustments often result in additional charges that go unchecked. Little or no reconciliation between what was contracted and what is billed can lead to significant cost overruns.
When data is disjointed and reconciliation is a manual process, differences between invoices and contracts are problematic and hard to resolve. This can lead to disputes with vendors, incorrect payments being made, and overpayments because of unnecessary or incorrect charges.
Take steps to address circuit management
Syniverse Universal Commerce for Circuits (UCC) tackles the root causes of poor circuit management by bringing visibility, automation, and intelligence into a traditionally fragmented process. By consolidating internal and vendor data into a single, intuitive dashboard, UCC gives teams a clear, real-time view of all active and unused circuits, making it easy to eliminate redundant services and stop paying for circuits that deliver no value.
It has the ability to embed contract terms, rates, and SLAs directly into workflows, ensuring that MRCs and NRCs match the agreements and that discrepancies are flagged with actionable insights to drive costs down. SLA metrics are also tracked alongside contractual obligations, so issues are quickly identified. UCC helps mobile network operators, enterprises, and digital service providers lower circuits costs by reducing manual work, eliminating errors, and improving reconciliation accuracy. It also automates multiple sources of information into a single view, which reduces overhead costs and eliminates manual, time-consuming tasks.
The result is a streamlined, transparent, and cost-efficient circuit management process that empowers organizations to regain control over their network costs and vendor relationships.
Learn more about how Syniverse UC for Circuits can streamline circuit billing to cut costs and automate your operations.
