Purpose

Commercial and bundled SS7 stacks are quite expensive. We have heard reports of stack source code licensing fees approaching $500,000. This cost makes it difficult for VAS providers, consultants, small companies, and researchers to use and develop with SS7 and contribute to the procotol, its robustness, and effective reference and product implementations.

OpenSS7's solution to this problem is to make publicly available open source code for an SS7 stack available to VAS providers, consultants, small companies and researchers, as well as MNOs and carriers.

Proprietary SS7 stacks tend to be bundled with much larger telecommunications products and platforms, and have complex and proprietary redundancy arrangements: making simple applications based on SS7 difficult to develop and integrate.

OpenSS7's solution SS7 stack implementation is not bound to any specific SS7 application to reduce integration complexity. The OpenSS7 redunancy is based on open architectures, COTS platforms, the Linux operating system and utilizes open protocols between processors to further reduce complexity and ease integration.

Proprietary SS7 stacks normally have guarded implementation code which is not open to the scrutiny of others. It is our opinion that this leads to a higher number of sustained defects in the resulting implementation due to the reduced number of reviewers who have access to the source code for inspection. Further, closed source code has lengthly loop cycles for correcting and regression testing defects.

OpenSS7's solution to this problem was to make source code publicly available for scrutiny of as many reviewers as possible, leading to a robust and correct implementation of the specifications. Also, incorporation of validation and regression testing into the software build process has greatly shortened the delay from fix to field.

Until recently, only SS7 implementations that have passed a series of conformance tests and certification processes have been permitted to be connected to an existing SS7 network controlled by an incumbent carrier. Many small companies developing SS7 implementations have been impeded by the high costs associated with attaining and maintaining certification.

OpenSS7 has assisted clients in rapidly obtaining certification of equipment using the OpenSS7 stack. For example, full SS7 certification to ISUP with C&W for international operation took 2 days from acceptance test start.

The availability to the core competencies and expertise surrounding SS7, its implementation and applications was traditionally only possible for incumbent carriers. Many of the specifications of SS7 were not publicly available, and could only be purchased (sometimes at significant cost). Furthermore, expertise in the implementation of SS7 stacks and expertise in SS7 applications are two different domains. SS7 applications require domain knowledge in areas not directly related to lower layers of the SS7 protocol.

This has made it difficult for VAS providers, consultants, companies and researchers with application domain knowledge to acquire a simple and usable stack upon which to experiment or develop and deploy their applications.

OpenSS7's solution to this problem was to provide an SS7 stack with well-defined API abstraction that permits application domain experts to concentrate on their application rather than being concerned with stack implementation or interface nuances. Using the stack is as easy as opening a socket or STREAM, binding it to an SS7 address, and exchanging packets.