Telecom Billing |
Why CDR Meditation Is an Essential Part of Telecom Billing?
Telecom
billing is probably the most confusing and scrutinized task in the telecom
industry. The scrutiny comes from customers who are more often than not
dissatisfied with their bills. This leads to confusion amongst the telecom
vendors who start looking everywhere for new telecom billing solutions. Mostly,
this problem arises because the telecom billing software used by them are subpar and do not meet the high
requirements of modern-day businesses.
Why Telecom Billing Solutions Are Important?
All the efforts
made by telecom service providers in setting up a network will amount to
nothing if telecom billing is not up to standards. This is why, telecom billing solutions become
important as they play a crucial role in accounting for those services. Not
only is the revenue generated by a telecom provider dependent on billing,
customers’ trust is also directly connected with the quality of the billing
services. For instance, if a customer starts receiving wrong bills, his trust in
the services nosedives from that moment onwards. On the other hand, if the
billing services are sound, the customer stays faithful and brings in new
customers.
CDRs: The Fundamental Unit of Telecom Billing Process
CDR (Call
Data Record) is the fundamental unit of telecom billing process. All interactions
between the user and telecom networking elements are captured by CDRs. A CDR
has the following attributes:
1. Date and starting
time of the call
2. Duration of
the call
3. Calling
party
4. Called party
5. Type of call
e.g. voice, SMS, data etc.
6. Unique
record sequence number that is used for identification
The captured
CDRs are vitally important for the proper operation of a billing system.
However, these CDRs are raw in nature, which means they cannot be interpreted
by a billing system.
CDR Meditation System: The Unsung Hero of Telecom Billing
Solutions
To ensure
the captured CDRs are converted into a format that is understood by the billing
system, a CDR meditation system is employed. The meditation system receives the
unformatted CDRs, converts them into the necessary format and sends them to the
billing system. Besides conversion, it also performs the operation of filtering
out calls that do not meet set criterion by the telecom vendor. For example, if
a call with duration less than 10 second needs to be filtered out, it is done
by CDR meditation system. Moreover, if some extra information needs to be
provided that is crucial for billing procedure, the meditation system gathers
that information based on certain attributes and then sends it to the billing
system via FTP (File Transfer Protocol). FTP is required for transfer of this
information as both billing software and meditation modules are installed on
different systems.
After the
billing system receives the formatted CDR, it is able to interpret the
information and rate the services utilized by customers.
Summary
Billing
system in telecom is quite complex and requires processing of data at different
levels for accomplishment of billing-related tasks. Although the user is not
aware of what goes on behind the scenes, the role of systems like meditation
system that converts raw CDRs into formatted CDRs is extremely important. All telecom billing solutions require
correct formatting of CDR for reliable and accurate completion of billing
tasks.
big data processing technologies
big data processing technologies
1 Comments
Thanks for writing this great article! It’s very informative, and you included some great points to the equally great article regarding Telecom Billing System
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