i-BGP :: Case / Merging billing systems

Objective:

Implement a comprehensive billing service throughout a telecommunications network that uses multiple switch types.

Situation:

• Company A recently completed a series of mergers and acquisitions. It resulted in the ownership of a telecommunications network that includes switches from various manufacturers. However, Company A wishes to supply to its customers the same level of service regardless through which switch the call was routed.


• The problem is that the implementation of a service on the switch and the format of the EDR that describes the service depend on the switch type and its software release.


• Company A’s billing system can read a limited number of EDR file formats, and the piece of software that reads them is coded within the application. Therefore, they need to go through a new development cycle in order to support the new switch types.


• The development team has limited resources and the required time to support all the switch types and versions can be extremely long. Also, the co-ordination for gathering the necessary information can be a frustrating task, which increases the chances of seeing the project fail, or may present many problems once put in production. Furthermore, Company A would then depend on a small number of developers to manage critical data.

Solution:

iBGP manages file format models with great ease. It allows a large community of users to efficiently exchange a knowledge base related to EDR file formats. It could even allow Company A to request that its switch suppliers provide them the file formats in an exchangeable iBGP modeling format.

iBGP makes it easy to create a file model as it has a standard and user-friendly interface. It also makes it easy to understand an existing file model because of its straightforward approach. Additionally, it makes it possible to re-use file models that have already been created.

Conclusion:

An event mediation device helps distribute knowledge throughout the company and provides a safe environment for developing conversion and filtering processes on EDR files. It improves the company’s reactivity and adaptability to new market requests.

The company can safely build a strategy that relies on a unique EDR file format for the billing system and at the same time support a wide range of file formats belonging to different types of switches.