TOTAL SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS, INC.
Serving the Telecommunications Industry for over a decade with
Mediation, Settlement and Rating Software

CDR MEDIATOR©

Billing Mediation Overview

As a seasoned provider of support systems to telecommunications providers, TSS has observed the changing landscape of the telecom industry first hand. Our customers, driven by competitive pressures and deregulation, view state-of-the-art billing mediation as a means to improve their customer care as well as their bottom line.

Now, more than ever, operators require accurate and timely management of billing data. Today, they must also prioritize infrastructure investments that balance the needs of customers with the changing regulatory environments and the overall growth in telecommunications traffic and services.

Operators are interested in using billing information as a competitive advantage and to accomplish more than just sending out a telephone bill. Billing data has always been the livelihood of operators and fundamental in operational priorities. In the past, raw billing data would be collected and move slowly downstream to feed the monolithic rating, billing and invoicing systems. Today worldwide trends in deregulation coupled with the introduction of new technologies have increased the volume of the types and quantity of calls by unprecedented amounts. This change demanded a more effective and powerful collection method, namely real-time billing mediation.

The criteria an operator uses to evaluate real time mediation systems should consider present as well as future issues. When these systems contain the right characteristics, they can act as powerful tools to feed decision support systems and improve the bottom line. For example, a real time mediation system should:

• Access the data immediately:
  The system should provide the capability to upgrade existing 'polled data' switches to a state-of-the-art real-time data switch.
• Normalize the data:
  A key role of the mediation system is to transform multiple format events to a common format. This improves the performance of downstream processing and allows versatility in vendor selection when new applications are added.
• Support multiple methods of data capture:
  Real-time mediation systems must pull data from all vintages of generating systems and normalize the data collected into a single format, and then distribute it to a multitude of billing and other support systems, which may require their own specially formatted call records.
• Offer a toolbox and workshop:
  Such tools include a transaction filter, a transaction file filter, a data distribution module, validation module, and rating module or a re-formatter.
• Support just-in-time data delivery:
  Operators need to determine which data needs to be handled immediately and which data can be handled in, near real-time. This saves the additional processing and bandwidth costs associated with delivering data immediately.
• Provide an auditing capability:
  Auditing will ensure that data is not lost or duplicated. If data is lost, the system must be able to recover lost data. If duplicated the system needs to detect and remove duplicate data.
• Quickly adapt to multiple data generating systems interfaces:
  The system should be able to correlate, validate and aggregate data from multiple technologies, vendors and versions.
• Provide a management system:
  A management system will allow the operators to quickly and easily update software, change configuration settings, detect faults, take corrective actions and ensure the corrective actions were implemented and effective.
• Ease the workload from the traditional billing stream:
  An effective real time mediation system can handle traditional switch tasks such as call assembly and re-formatting, as well as downstream billing functions such pre-rating and normalization of call records.
• Provide Application Programming Interfaces:
  As a connecion point for third parties or the telephone company to access billing data with add-on applications that provide a competitive advantage.
  
  Based upon the breadth of the requirements and the need to keep up with state-of-the-art telecommunications technologies, mediation has become a specialist skill. TSS developed its real time mediation systems from this list of requirements and our experience in the industry.
  
  The features described above should be included in any robust billing data collection solution. However, the specific components can vary depending on the needs and current installed equipment of the operator. For example, for operators using switches with tape output, TSS recommends data servers close to the switch because they can emulate the existing tape systems and collect the data at its furthest point downstream. Even operators without the need to replace the tapes still benefit from collection close to the switch because of the pre-processing power that the data server can offer. This accelerates delivery of that information by quickly collecting data from the generating system and sorting, filtering, copying, and routing it to the appropriate destinations, without requiring the data to continue along the network until it reaches a server for processing. The CDR Mediator by TSS will provide all of the necessary functions, whether it's for wireless services in CDMA/TDMA, GSM, and GPRS formats, or mobile IS41 format. Even landline data with old BellCore formats can be processed. The bottom line is, any proprietary or industry-standard format can be handled by CDR Mediator. In addition, multiple transaction types can be processed, including roaming, 1xRTT, SMS, MMS, m-Commerce, and WI-FI transactions.
  
  But what benefits will your company realize?
  
  The user of CDR Mediator will see increased revenues, as leakage is eliminated that is caused by non-unified systems and process legacy architecture. Further, rules-based mediation enables swift product implementations.
  
  Another benefit of CDR Mediator will be the reduction of your company's operating costs, as fragmentation of system administration is eliminated, resource requirements for data acquisition and mediation are minimized, and maintenance costs are reduced significantly
  

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