A regional carrier builds an 18M-minute bilateral swap in ninety days
The Customer - A licensed regional wholesale carrier headquartered in the Gulf, with direct interconnects into mobile and fixed operators across the GCC, Egypt and the Levant, and a growing volume of outbound traffic to South Asia from its retail and enterprise customers.
The Situation - The carrier was buying South Asia termination - India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal - from two prepaid wholesale suppliers, with route quality that varied week to week and prepayment tying up working capital. In the other direction, Dollu had growing customer demand for premium-quality termination into the GCC and North Africa and was buying part of it through hubs. Both sides had traffic the other wanted, and both were paying intermediaries for it.
The Challenge - Bilateral swaps often stall on three things: agreeing rates when the two traffic profiles are asymmetric, establishing trust in each other's quality claims, and running settlement without one side carrying credit risk. The customer's compliance team also needed assurance that South Asia traffic would terminate on licensed direct routes, and that CLI on their premium tier would be preserved end to end. Both parties needed the interconnect to be operationally resilient, since each was becoming the other's primary route on the swapped destinations.
What We Did - Carrier-relations teams on both sides agreed a destination-by-destination swap: Dollu supplied CLI-guaranteed premium and standard tiers on the five South Asian destinations from its direct operator interconnects; the customer supplied premium tiers on UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt and Jordan. Rates were set per destination against a shared reference basket, with a monthly review clause. Technically, we stood up dual SIP interconnects - a private cross-connect at our Frankfurt PoP and an IPsec-protected path via Mumbai - with G.711 and G.729 negotiated per route, RFC 2833 DTMF, and OPTIONS-based liveness on both sides. Each carrier ran a fourteen-day quality trial on the other's routes with live traffic before commercial volumes moved, and ASR, ACD, PDD and CLI-delivery statistics were exchanged daily through a shared dashboard rather than asserted. Settlement was structured as net billing with a monthly reconciliation window and a mutually agreed CDR-matching tolerance, and both NOCs exchanged escalation contacts and P1 response commitments.
The Results - Traffic in each direction ramped over eight weeks and reached a combined 18 million minutes per month by the end of the first quarter, with the customer moving all South Asia traffic off its prepaid suppliers and Dollu retiring two hub routes for GCC destinations. Quality on the swapped South Asia routes measured from the customer's switch showed ASR up nine points and PDD down by half compared with the previous suppliers. CDR mismatch on the first three reconciliations was under 0.4 percent, inside the agreed tolerance, and net settlement freed several hundred thousand dollars of prepayment on the customer's side. The relationship has since expanded to a further six destinations, and the two carriers now run a joint quarterly route-quality review.
“Most bilateral discussions run out of energy at the rate-sheet stage. This one moved because the routing and NOC teams were in the room from the first call, and because both sides could see the same quality data. It became an operating relationship rather than a spreadsheet.”
