Mediation is the broad function that interfaces the Telco back office to network elements (mostly switches) for the acquisition and delivery of required usage data to the billing system or other applications like inter-operator accounting, fraud management, network monitoring, data warehouse.

The efficiency of billing data acquisition and delivery is more and more crucial to the whole billing process. First of all, telecom operators expect a revenue assurance from their mediation and billing systems. Nowadays every call must be turned into revenue in real time. So the efficiency of mediation and billing systems is directly dependent on the efficiency of the data collection system.

Call Detail Records (CDR) also provide valuable information about market segmentation, allowing operators to have a better knowledge of their customers' requirements and behaviors. Mediation system and data collection play a more and more important role in defining and delivering new targeted value added services ahead of their competitors.

The Call Detail Record Collection is a really strategic investment for telecom operators and must be reliable and performant to assure complete and timely revenues.

Moreover, telecom operators need more and more sophisticated billing system to support their complex environment and the large volumes of information. Indeed, telcos have to constantly face the challenge of adapting their billing and mediation systems to support their new commercial offers in very short time and at the lowest costs possible. The scalability and flexibility of their data collection system is very important and necessary to support these network evolutions or required CDR format changes and allow telecom operators and service providers to reduce associated costs.

The data collection is really on the borderline between networking and billing. However, mastering all networking aspects requires completely different knowledge and expertise from the ones used in data processing, traffic analysis or billing.

Finally, it is today necessary for telecom operators to have a performant data collection system, which is:

• robust and reliable,
• able to process large volumes of Call Detail Record,
• able to interoperate with the most widely deployed kind of switches,
• able to evolve with network and Information System changes,
• easy to operate from day to day,
• easy to interface with any mediation and billing system.

With the MARBEN™ CDR Collection, MARBEN™ Products provides you an efficient data collection system, which integrates all networking aspects of CDR Collection and which is central to mediation and data collection applications



The MARBEN™ CDR Collection

The MARBEN™ CDR Collection bridges the gap between the network of telephone switches and the billing system. It deals with retrieving the Call Detail Records from the switches network (fixed or mobile) and passing them through to the billing system or any other downstream applications of the Telco information system.


Fig.1: The MARBEN™ CDR Collection in Telco OSS/BSS


The MARBEN™ CDR Collection is aimed at hiding the details and complexity of the communication with the network of switches and appearing as a single source of CDR data to the mediation and billing system. It is a stand-alone application that comes within the mediation and billing system.

The MARBEN™ CDR Collection has been designed to fulfill the most important requirements of CDR collection and mediation:

• it interoperates with the most widely deployed telephone switches having an FTAM and/or CMIP interface,
  
• it is robust, performant and reliable because it is built on the MARBEN™ implementation of the OSI protocols which capitalizes 15 years of experience and is acknowledged as a reference implementation,
  
• it is easy to integrate to a CDR mediation or billing application thanks to a high level file transfer API.
  

With MARBEN™ CDR Collection, MARBEN™ Products addresses the needs of all actors in the area of Call Detail Record, mediation and billing:

• Operators, service providers and integrators who want to build custom mediation or billing systems.
  
• Editors of mediation or billing software who can extend their connectivity capabilities integrating the MARBEN™ CDR Collection in their own product.
  
• Telecom equipment manufacturers who can embed the MARBEN™ CDR Collection in their own CDR collection/mediation offer.