Telecommunications mediation

Telecommunications mediation is a process that converts call data to pre-defined layouts that can be imported by a specific billing system or other OSS applications.

A billing mediation platform is a system used to convert data of certain datatypes to other datatypes, usually for billing purposes. Billing Mediation Platforms are used mostly by telephone companies, who typically need to process UDRs (Usage Detail Records). In call scenarios UDRs are most often known as CDRs (Call Detail Records), and among broadband carriers they are often referred to as IPDR.

The CDR/UDR datatypes hold data such as NPX, NPA, Call Duration, peak time flag and call length. Data may be represented in ascii or binary formats. The billing mediation platform typically reads this data and converts it into common normalized format.

Billing Systems and all other downstream systems, in turn, converts this data to component[its own] understandable format.

Billing mediation platforms get their name from their behavior: they "mediate" data between systems. In a typical telephone company scenario, the systems providing data to the mediation platform are network elements, such as telephone switches, and the systems receiving data from the mediation platform perform accounting, auditing, archiving, or bill-generation functions. The mediation system collects, collates and prepares data for consumption by the downstream systems, which often accept data only in a limited set of formats.

Typically a mediation platform is used for the following tasks:

In a telecom billing scenario, mediation is the first step after receiving a CDR. The mediated CDR is forwarded to a rating engine, which calculates the charge associated with the CDRs. In today's world Rating Engines are more becoming necessary for the telecom billing system to meet the growing variant customer needs for different services.

Despite the name, not all of the data transferred via billing mediation platforms is actually used for billing purposes. For instance, the mediation software might generate traffic volume statistics based on the number and origin of the records passing through it. Those statistics could then be used for capacity planning, as part of a network monitoring procedure, or for any other business intelligence applications.

At core Mediation involves data transfer between various systems with or without modification of data starting from Network elements to OSS/BSS systems.

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