About mobilcom debitel

mobilcom debitel is one of the leading telecommunication companies in Germany. The company offers more than 20 million customers a wide range of wireless service contracts for national networks like T-Mobile, Vodafone, E-Plus and O2. They are third largest mobile service provider in Germany and one of the largest in Europe.

Business Challenge

New Services

The telecommunication market encounters an ever growing repertoire of access technologies, services and tariff options to offer to their customers. As a service provider in Germany mobilcom debitel needs to deal with those challenges in two directions:

• Changing interfaces in communication with network operators and
• Best of breed services to their customers.

In order to be ahead of the competition mobilcom debitel decided to consolidate their in-house developed mediation and CDR parsing system components by replacing it with a configurable standardized product.

mobilcom debitel was aiming for an extended CDR/EDR processing engine that supports a fast time to market for new services and features in a stable but flexible environment.

Detailed Requirements

The following functionality for a CDR pre-pocessing system was requested by mobilcom debitel:

• Easy format configuration.
• Header-, Trailer and format validation.
• Fully configurable and parameterisable Mapping of CDR formats.
• Normalization.
• File Splitting based on file size and/or incoming data.
• Discarding of certain records.
• File Sequence Check to avoid duplicates respectively gaps in file processing.
• Comfortable error handling.
• Reporting / revenue assurance support through the processing chain.
• Fully automated processing.
• Stable system environment.
• Standard software package.

The CDR/EDR pre-processing needs to run in an automated production environment. EDR Workbench automatically picks up the files, processes and distributes them in the required in-house format to the subsequent billing environment. Future requirements in functionality and features should be easy to implement.

Solved with EDR Workbench

Together with the ENTEREST Service Team, mobilcom debitel decided on a set-up for the CDR-Processing requirements which was configured and tested within very little time and at affordable costs.

One Factory for all mediation scenarios

mobilcom debitel handle their up to 8 million CDR-per-day mediation-challenge with EDR Workbench.

The incoming CDR files from the different network operators as well as the CDRs of mobilcom debitel's in-house SMSC are automatically picked up and processed through an EDR Workbench factory.

The CDR header-, trailer– and format validation ensures that only valid incoming CDR files are processed. Discarding rules are configured to filter CDR data that is not rated resp. billed in a later stage .

The different incoming formats are mapped to mobilcom debitel's internal format. External reference data used to apply the mapping rules is maintained and provided through a mySQL database.

Splitting rules to scale down the file size for mobilcom debitel's subsequent CDR/EDR processing chain are implemented. The required trailer information is automatically re-calculated for the output streams.

Special methods enable you to create CDRs and batches on-the-fly, duplicate or dump records, split streams, filter records, analyze and modify content etc. There is virtually no limit to what you can do using openBSL®.

CDR Formats

mobilcom debitel processes CDRs from four different network operator's as well as their in-house SMSC format through EDR Workbench. This leads to a configuration of 12 different input formats which are mapped to mobilcom debitel's unique in-house format.

CDR processing with openBSL®

To apply the CDR manipulation operations such as discarding rules, mapping rules, splitting rules or trailer recalculation, mobilcom debitel made use of EDR Workbench's built in scripting language openBSL® (open Bot Scripting Language). This language allows you to access any CDR-field while it is being processed. It features all elements of a modern scripting-language such as object-orientation and events.

openBSL® is optimized for CDR-processing tasks and grants access to complete CDR-structures and content. Special methods enable you to create CDRs and batches on-the-fly, duplicate or dump records, split streams, filter records, analyze and modify content etc. There is virtually no limit to what you can do using openBSL®.

EDR Workbench provides various methods on how to consider external parameters to be included in CDR-manipulation (e.g. database or flat-file). Storing the CDR information in a database is a simple tasks within openBSL® and allows other systems to use this information in subsequent stages.

Comfortable Error Handling

CDRs that cannot be mapped due to missing information within the CDR or the configuration entries are sent out to the error handling stream and can be viewed and analyzed interactively using the comprehensive EDR Workbench GUI. After correction, the files can be re-processed using the implemented recycling stream.

Deployment

Deployment was done on a two processor Linux server with 2 GB RAM and individual PCs for the EDR Workbench GUI.

Summary and Result

Using EDR Workbench enables mobilcom debitel to pre-process their CDRs in a high performance and fully automated mediation environment which supports the requirements resulting from the fast and frequently changing service provider business.

EDR Workbench and its scripting language openBSL® allow mobilcom debitel to implement all CDR-manipulations required in the future.

The open and flexible functionality in combination with the easy configuration of the CDR formats improves new system and service implementation which saves cost and shortens mobilcom debitel's time-to-market as well as it increases the overall processing quality.

Best of all: Deployment and configuration was a matter of very little time and did not require any custom-development.

Testimonial

"EDR Workbench gave us all the flexibility we needed to overcome our pre-processing challenge. … We feel extremely comfortable with the flexible configuration methods in EDR Workbench which help us to be even better prepared for the future."

S.K., Head of Billing