About Star 01094

Star 01094 Germany is a German fixed-net carrier, offering Pre-Selection and Call-By-Call telephony with very competitive rates to specific regions in the world. Additionally, Star Germany offers products for the inter-carrier telephony business.

Business Challenge

Growing customer base

Starcomm Germany's subscriber base is growing year-by-year; new regions in the world are offered with very competitive rates. In order to enable fast and flexible price plans to react on new market requirements, Starcomm Germany decided to replace their existing mediation and rating system. 

Offline Billing

One of Starcomm Germany's offering is Call-By-Call telephony. In this business customers are selecting Starcomm's fixed-network simply by prefixing the destination number with Starcomm's 01094-dial-code. Customers are then paying these calls via their standard Deutsche Telekom bill (Offline Billing). The billing information is transferred from Starcomm to Deutsche Telekom using a specific CDR exchange format. This requires a mapping of the Call-By-Call CDRs from the in-house format to the Offline Billing format specified by Deutsche Telekom.

Detailed Requirements

Starcomm Germany defined the following requirements for the desired rating and mapping system:

• Read raw CDR data coming from the switch in ASCII-format.
• Import the raw data into a mySQL database.
• Load the rating reference data from the Starcomm rating database.
• Discard erroneous CDRs
• Rate all CDRs according to Starcomm's rate plans for customer or carrier business.
• Import the rated CDRs into the Starcomm mySQL database.
• Split and route the rated CDRs based on business rules.
• Write the rated CDRs to an in-house ASCII-CDR-format.
• Map the in-house CDR-format to the standard Deutsche Telekom Offline Billing CDR-format.
• Create an exchange file, containing all CDRs in the Deutsche Telekom (DTAG)Offline Billing Format.

This CDR processing system needs to run in an automated production environment. EDR Workbench automatically picks up the raw data, rates the call with the corresponding rate plans and stores the CDR and rating information in the database.

Moreover, the required Deutsche Telekom exchange-file is automatically created and the rating reference data is reloaded once a day.

Solved with EDR Workbench

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

Rating & Offline Billing Factories

Starcomm Germany chose to separate the ongoing rating functionality from the daily task of creating the Deutsche Telekom exchange file.

The rating factory automatically reads and rates the CDRs which are provided via the switch collector.

The CDRs are stored in the database (raw and rated CDR information) and are additionally stored in a rated CDR ASCII file format for later processing steps. The CDR stream is split into customer or carrier business based on the call scenario of the CDR.

The Offline Billing Factory reads all customer records which should be billed via the Deutsche Telekom invoice and maps the CDR into the Deutsche Telekom exchange format. The required header and Trailer information is created resp. calculated.

CDR Formats

Starcomm Germany has configured EDR Workbench to handle three different CDR-formats. This includes their in-house format for raw and rated CDRs as well as the CD

CDR manipulation with openBSL®

Starcomm also made use of EDR Workbench's built in scripting language openBSL® (open Bot Scripting Language). This language allows you to access and manipulate any CDR-field while it is being processed. It features all elements of a modern scripting-language such as object-orientation and events.

It 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.

Starcomm Germany maintains all of their rating reference data in a mySQL database. Changes to the rate plans and their structures are done directly via the database tables using mySQL tools.

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 Starcomm to rate their CDRs as a high performance fully automated process and to support the requirements coming from the Offline Billing business with the Deutsche Telekom.

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

Changes or adaptations for new requirements to the CDR processing can be implemented by Starcomm itself.

This type of open and flexible functionality in combination with the easy configuration of the CDR formats makes EDR Workbench cost-effective and future-safe.