Carrier Interconnect Guide

Sort the agreement and the rules before any cable or bind is provisioned.

• Agree the interconnect commercial model: termination rates, settlement and volume commitments.
• Define the traffic scope: A2P vs P2P messaging, voice termination, and permitted use.
• Document number ranges, routing responsibilities and quality obligations in the agreement.
• Confirm regulatory and licensing requirements in each jurisdiction you interconnect for.
• Reference GSMA interworking guidance for messaging (IR.71 family) in the agreement.

• Choose the connectivity: SS7/SIGTRAN (M3UA/SUA) for signalling, SMPP for A2P messaging.
• Provision redundant links (dual-homed) with no single point of failure.Interconnect links carry revenue traffic — geographic and path redundancy is non-negotiable.
• Agree point codes, GT (global title) translation and addressing with the partner.
• For SMPP, agree bind types, concurrent binds, per-bind TPS and address ranges in writing.Opening more binds than provisioned is a common cause of throttling or account drops.
• Secure the transport: SMPP over TLS or IP allow-listing, and signalling-layer controls.

• Configure routing tables and least-cost / quality-based routing per destination.
• Set up number ranges, sender-ID handling and any home-routing arrangement.
• Define failover and overflow routing to alternate partners on degradation.
• Align data coding and encoding handling (GSM-7, UCS-2) across the interconnect.

• Run end-to-end test traffic to live test numbers on every route before go-live.
• Verify delivery receipts / call completion and correct status mapping across the boundary.
• Test long and Unicode messages, and edge cases like number portability where relevant.
• Load-test at provisioned capacity and confirm graceful behaviour at the ceiling.
• Simulate a link failure and confirm clean failover with no traffic loss or duplication.

• Monitor link health, bind state, throughput, latency and error-code rates with alerting.
• Reconcile traffic and settlement per route to catch leakage and billing disputes early.
• Watch for interconnect fraud: SIM-box bypass, grey-route A2P leakage and IRSF on voice.Cross-reference GSMA fraud & security guidance when defining detection rules.
• Keep evidence (CDRs, signalling traces) for dispute resolution with partners.
• Review route quality and commercials regularly and rebalance as traffic shifts.