Maintain Network Operations with Care via Cutting-Edge Operations Support System
An Operations Support System along with business support system constitutes a major share of telecom operations.
An Operations Support System along with business support system constitutes a major share of telecom operations. In the past, both OSS and BSS were considered to be separate paradigms; however, the line between them is collapsing very fast. The modern-day approach is about increasing efficiency, for which, it is necessary to have an overlapping of these two telecom business functions. A rise in the use of IT methodologies and virtual functions has made it possible to have a single interface for managing both business and operational tasks.
Support Better Service Delivery with Innovative Operation Support System
An OSS performs the following tasks:
· Management of different network functions
· Delivery of service
· Fulfillment of service
· Service assurance
· Timely support to telecom customers
To perform these tasks, an OSS relies upon:
· Management of data
· Arrangement of sequence, in which, the tasks need to be performed
· Upgrades in technology to meet growing requirements
· Management of data and processes via relevant applications (APIs)
An Operation Support System performs the extremely important task of identifying errors and making the operation error-proof. Nowadays, telecom operations are carried out in a seamless manner and the OSS functions can be performed by a single intuitive interface.
Combine B/OSS with Quality Billing for Best Service
A single interface that manages all day-to-day telecom operations is nothing less than a godsend. Platforms like Telgoo5 offer both single and unified telecom solutions that work ideally for MNO, MVNO and MVNE.
Complete management via a single platform
When you have a state-of-the-art B/OSS model along with real-time charging, you can serve your customers in the best way possible. It becomes easier to have a single view of customers during monetization, service delivery and billing.
Greater revenue assurance
A real-time Online Charging System (OCS) ensures charging of transactions in a few milliseconds. Hence, there is no revenue leakage, and the billing is completely transparent for the subscribers.
Ability to launch differentiated products
Modern-day telcos need to think on their feet. A versatile telecom support system allows telcos to create attractive plans that combine a wide range of services. For example, you can monetize a video streaming service with a data pack. Also, you can manage the complete partnership with a third-party service provider. There is complete abstraction in the process i.e. the system does everything for you and you do not feel out of your depth even while creating complex service plans for the users.
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.
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:
Date and starting time of the call
Duration of the call
Calling party
Called party
Type of call e.g. voice, SMS, data etc.
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.