In the US, the idea of collecting billing data in the telecommunications industry goes back to 1949, as the first instance of “true” AMA data collection occurred in Philadelphia.  The medium was a multi-entry format paper tape with punched holes representing numbers and codes.  The tapes were collected physically from the central office and sent to a centralized location that read the tape, backwards, into an IBM machine that created punched cards to be fed into the biller.  This method persisted throughout the system until the late ‘60s to early '70s when the paper tape was slowly replaced by Billing Data Transmitters at the Central Office.  These transmitters sent the data to a central AMA Recording Center (AMARC) which converted the multi-entry format to magnetic tape to a single record that was sent to the biller.   As the system evolved through the ‘70s, it transitioned from mechanical networks sending multi-entry formats to electronic networks sending single entry formats over dial-up connections to the centralized collector.

Early mediation platforms were slow and involved the collection of billing usage from the switch by the data collector.  Each switch or network element was polled by the data collector and any data in queue was forwarded.  After collection, the data was stored to a hard drive and forwarded downstream to the billing system according to a predetermined schedule.  These store and forward devices had little intelligence, little or no filtering capability and did not perform any conversion of the incoming data.  The format generated by the network element was the format delivered to the biller.  Companies that had network elements that generated different formats were forced to create up-front conversion programs so that the incoming billing data could be fed into the downstream systems.  For most of the ‘80s, the network element decided which Call Detail Records (CDRs) were billable and the downstream front-end systems did the work of finding and categorizing good and bad CDRs and clearing the non-billable data from the biller.  Having the switching network decide what was and what was not billable was inefficient because it required changes to the switching fabric to create new billable services.  The burden of the editing, filtering and converting data downstream was impractical and, as with the network, slowed the implementation of new services.  The late '80s closed with most mediation platforms providing File Transfer and Access Management (FTAM) using the International Telephone Union (ITU) X.25 packet protocol.

During the ’90s, the mediation platform turned the corner as a rule-based core allowed it to take most of the work away from the network elements and the downstream systems.  It became a multi-faceted system with the ability to accept any input data format that it converted to any output data format required.  The platform now had the ability to filter, and edit CDRs based on rules coded into its software, generate multiple copies of a CDR to feed multiple downstream systems and decide which records were billable.  It unburdened the downstream systems and reduced the time necessary for the introduction of new products.  During this period Telenor, Norway's telecommunications carrier, established an end-to-end automated data collection and delivery system using Transaction Control Protocol over the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) on Local Area Networks (LAN).  The world of the mediation platform changed dramatically and the future was on us.

Currently the mediation platform is a “hub” of the data transfer system in the communications industry and a critical player in insuring that the revenue stream is secure.  With the Cable companies moving into the telephone space through Hybrid and IP connections and the Telephone companies moving towards the cable space with Digital Subscriber Line (DSL), the mediation platform’s evolution continues. 

Communications is an environment that is required 24/7.  The ubiquitous availability of fixed, mobile and internet connectivity demands a new set of features and services, not just basic telephony. These services offered through Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), instant internet availability, video, and text messaging create massive sets of data events that need to be captured, correlated, categorized and disseminated, and the mediation platform needs to be real-time and scalable.  All of this data, billing, service management, and mediation functionality will require better performance and more transaction based intelligence.  The mediation platform will be responsible for the extraction of the correct billable information to optimize feature revenues.  Even if many new services do not fit the typical usage sensitive mold, the data collected by mediation will be used for more than just billing the user of the service. It will be critical in performance monitoring, validation of inter-network compensation and validation of customer service levels.  For pre-paid features, mediation could be responsible for notifying downstream systems to decrement an account and respond back to a user with a balance report.  A single IP session could generate a stream of data that, although not billed to the end user, may need to be broken into several Session Management Control Records (SMCRs).  These SCMRs will be used to invoice, validate and manage future Reciprocal Compensation, and local Peering Agreements.  Everyone could get a piece of this pie.  Future revenues will be generated by the End User, Network Server, Add Servers, and other multiple Enhanced Service servers.

Mediation of data has taken large strides in the past 50 years and TeleSciences has been a front runner in those strides for almost 40 of them. The future is now and TeleSciences has the systems that will protect the revenue stream regardless of the number of complex events from upstream or downstream.  Give us a call, we love to talk about what we do.