BROOMFIELD, Colorado – MEF wants to integrate blockchain technology into its Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) Reference Architecture and APIs to sort the inefficacious telecom contract, billing, and dispute environment.

“When you have an agreement or master service agreement between the buyer and the seller, each party is essentially coding their understanding of that agreement internally and recording the transactions, and those two may or may not match,” explained Daniel Bar-Lev, VP of strategic programs at MEF during a keynote presentation at this week's MEF Annual Members Meeting. “And at a certain point, they have to reconcile that.”

This reconciliation process is getting harder to communicate. 

April Taylor, SVP of blockchain for Sage Management, wrote in a MEF blog that “the legacy billing systems being utilized by the carriers today were built to bill a Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) network. Newer technologies do not fit into the same mold of the legacy networks as designed.”

Carriers are left trying to fit new technologies into billing and ordering systems that were not created for those technologies. This paired with outdated and “reactive patchwork” problem-solving methods create new operational and financial problems, Taylor explained. 

MEF sees blockchain’s decentralized and immutable structure as the needed response to start unifying operational transactions.

Bar-Lev told the audience to look at blockchain as a shared computer where the buyer and seller record and process information “in a shared place so that there isn't a need for disputes and reconciliation.”

“We use the LSO API's together with the LSO blockchain to mitigate that business and operational friction between individual links in the supply chain and aggregated over the whole supply chain,” he continued.  

With blockchain, transparency is created through the use of nodes interconnected as an Integrated Trust Network (ITN) that establishes trusted, decentralized parties to manage the chain's stipulations. MEF and the Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative (MOBI) seeded their ITN last year. 

MEF has 15 global node operators (including State Farm, USAA, Ford, and DENSO), with $450 billion in combined annual revenue. They all use blockchain consensus techniques to duplicate the other nodes for a trusted peer-to-peer network. 

MEF is interested in using this function for billing settlement, creating a master service agreement through smart contracts – a set of code that specifies irrefutable conditions for dispute settlement. Its current focus is in using pre-existing LSO API’s to test and certify smart contracts running on blockchain.