CDR Mediation|CDR Mediation Process|CDR Billing|CDR Billing Platform

CDR mediation or CDR billing involves using the Call Data Records (abbreviated as CDRs, which are generated by a telecom network switch) and processing them for rating the calls and charging them onto the customer bills. The job which carries out the CDR rating and charging is known as the billing mediation system. The billing mediation is also referred to as CDR mediation sometimes, interchangeably. The rated calls are sent to the telecom billing system for charging onto customer invoices.

EarnBill’s billing mediation feature helps companies rate and charge their consumption usage seamlessly. EarnBill’s billing mediation has been implemented in both small scale and big scale projects. It is based on an enterprise grade, robust, stable, scalable and flexible software framework which has been time tested and hardened with every new implementation.

CDR Formats

      • 3GPP CDR Format
      • ITU-T CDR Format
      • ANSI CDR Format
      • ETSI CDR Format

👉 Check the FAQ section for more understanding of the CDR formats: What are different CDR Formats?

EarnBill supports various different CDR formats including 3GPP CDR Format, ITU-T CDR Format and other proprietary CDR formats provided by different equipment manufacturers.

The most key fields in the 3GPP and the ITU-T CDR Formats are the following: Call Start Time, Call End Time, Calling Party Number, Called Party Number, Call Duration, Call Type (e.g., voice call, SMS or data session), Call Status (e.g., connected, dropped or unanswered), Billing Number, Charging Information, Location Information (e.g., cell tower ID and GPS coordinates etc), Service Type (e.g., prepaid, postpaid), Network Information (e.g., switch ID, cell ID or routing code).

CDR Mediation Process

CDR Mediation Process explianed

EarnBill’s CDR mediation job is divided into various sub tasks as illustrated in the diagram. The mediation job ensures through these steps that the raw CDR data is collected from various sources, validated, filtered, normalised and enriched with information that makes complete sense for the telecom billing system. The data normalisation process involves numbering the records with unique identifiers, which can be useful for forming references in the database tables. Also, useful for duplicate record validations.

The data validation and filtering ensures that only required data is fed to the data enriching task. The data enriching task finds out the associated customer account, the service, the pricing plan or the rate card, the event date, the usage product or the call type and more. This data is very useful for the rating engine. The rating engine then rates the Call Data Record according to the pricing plan subscribed to by the user. It does call level tax calculation as well and does call rated amount rounding such as the tax and rated amounts (including and excluding tax) are clearly the currency amounts.

The rated CDRs are now ready to be sent to the billing engine for data aggregation and charging. The data is aggregated or grouped by call types to be presented in the bill summary. The rated CDRs are available in the billing engine to be presented as the Call Itemisation onto the customer invoices.

EarnBill’s Billing Mediation

EarnBill provides a scalable mediation solution with multi node, multi thread processing of each CDR batch or CDR file. This ensures higher throughput in processing of CDRs with horizontal scaling. It clearly records CDRs that have errors in them and allows their reprocessing seamlessly after resolving the errors.

CDR Mediation Workflow

EarnBill’s mediation is illustrated in the workflow diagram above.

EarnBill provides the flexibility to process usage records from various industries. It can process usage records from Telecom (Call Data Records) or Energy domain (Power Companies), Cloud Services, TV/Internet Services, API Monetisation and more. EarnBill supports truly an industry agnostic billing mediation.

The raw usage records are then processed through the mediation engine (or rating engine) and then enriched and rated records are sent to the billing engine for charging onto invoices. The following section throws light on some salient features of EarnBill mediation.

➡️ Error Handling / Recycle

EarnBill mediation can generate and record errors for Call Data Records that are not processed due to incompleteness of the data or not meeting a certain validation rule built in the system. The system offers easy and configurable options to view and export errors, review them and reprocess the errors (or recycle them). This feature ensures that the errors in usage charging are kept to a bare minimum.

➡️ Undo / Rollback Mediation

The Undo or a Rollback of a mediation batch ensures that a wrongly processed batch is completely removed from the system and the rating and charging that it has generated. This option is required when there is a wrong configuration of a pricing plan or a rate card that leads to wrong charging. Also, if a wrong file is processed in the system by mistake then an undo option comes in handy.

➡️ CDR Job Monitoring

There is a good automated monitoring process included with EarnBill mediation that allows for notifying or alerting in case of errors. There is a good amount of configuration possible on which errors you would like to be notified. The monitoring job can be configured to run revenue assurance checks that will ensure validation of rating and charging of CDRs. This kind of active automated monitoring of mediation leads to proactively finding any issues and avoiding the need for a separate revenue assurance system.

Summary

Billing Mediation is an important module in billing and revenue management systems in the Telco BSS domain. EarnBill is an ideal and proven solution for usage billing with many successful mediation case studies. The proactive support from the EarnBill team ensures stable systems with less billing and rating issues and a successful implementation.

FAQs

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  • What are Call Detail Records (CDRs)?

Call Detail Records or CDRs are consumption usage records of a service such as phone usage or internet service usage or any other telecom related service that involves call events or usage events. The CDRs contain information about the particular usage event such as which service number is making the usage, type of call or service used, the duration of the call or quantity of the service utilised, the destination number if any was dialled, source (place) of the call, destination of the call, network route that was used for completing the call, the cost applied by the carrier in executing the call or service on their network and more.

  • What does the word ‘mediation’ mean?

The word mediation comes from the literal meaning of the word. CDRs represent the raw information about the calls and usage of various telecom or internet services. The billing system cannot make much sense of this information, unless a mediator job resolves the information received from CDRs into data that is understandable by the billing system, for charging the customers for their usage. 

  • What kind of usage is billed from CDR billing or billing mediation?

Billing Mediation covers rating and charging of all types of telecom and internet service usage, for example, usage such as local calls, national calls, mobile to mobile calls (same and different provider networks), mobile to fixed line calls, mobile originating calls or outgoing calls, mobile terminating calls or incoming calls, mobile data usage, text messages or SMS, MMS, GPRS usage and more.

There are different CDR specification standards that cover these different types of calls and use call type differentiation to mark each record with the type of usage it represents. 

  • What are different CDR Formats?

There are different CDR formats based on standards specified by different global institutions, such as:

❇️ 3GPP CDR Format – Defined by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), used in GSM, UMTS and LTE networks.

❇️ ITU-T CDR Format – ITU or International Telecommunication Union specified CDR format.

❇️ ANSI CDR Format – This is an American National Standards Institute provided CDR format. (North American Telecom systems).

❇️ ETSI CDR Format – The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). (European Telecom Networks).

Apart from these standard formats, there can be proprietary formats from different telecom operators and equipment manufacturers. More and more CDR formats are now-a-days using a CSV format (comma separated values), however there are sometimes flat files with fixed width formats, XML (Extended Markup Language) files and even JSON (Javascript Object Notation) files. Sometimes, CDRs are stored in a relational database and SQL is used to retrieve them for processing.

  • Why are CDRs important?

For a simple reason, usage billing. CDRs are a crucial source of information for rating and charging our phone calls and other usage. Most of the telecom and internet services are now relying on charging based on the usage plan that you choose. The usage plans come with different quotas. Cheaper the plan you choose, less the quota for calls and messages and data. On the contrary, if you choose a more expensive plan, you receive more quota for calling, text messaging and data.

Also, the postpaid plans offer less call rates on more expensive subscriptions, and higher call rates on cheaper subscriptions. The users of these telecommunication services get various options and they can choose a usage plan that best suits their requirement. In managing billing of these services, the consumption usage has to be measured and rated accurately. The CDRs produced by network switches give the accurate information about the calls, which then helps in updating the quotas and rating and charging the calls or other types of usage.

  • What is CDR in Telecom Billing?

CDR is an abbreviation for Call Data Records. Please check this FAQ section above for more information about “what are CDRs and how they are used in Telecom Billing”.

  • What is a CDR billing software or a CDR billing platform?

A CDR billing software (such as EarnBill) has the ability to process millions of CDRs that are received from a telecom network, rate these CDRs as per the pricing plans and rate cards and charge them on customer bills.