RA Question of the Week – Faulty Transmission

For this weeks question, I am going to return to a standard RA issue.

At a fixed line operator, it was identified that approximately 50% of CDRs, from a single switch country, were not being received by the mediation systems collector. After a full investigation, the X25 transmission was found to be faulty and hence only half of each CDR file was being transferred to the collector. The issue was identified without gaining access to the original CDR file from the switch or SS7 probe information. The issue had existed since the first day the switch had gone live so call volumes were as expected.

I am sure the majority of people reading this, will have a control in place to identify this issue, but for the benefit of those who don’t, please state your control for identifying the problem.

Dave Stuart
Dave Stuart
David is an experienced manager, having worked for a variety of international telcos. He has hands-on knowledge of fraud management, revenue assurance, risk management and software development. David is currently the Group Director of Revenue Assurance & Fraud Management at Vimpelcom.

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2 COMMENTS

  1. Would this issue have shown up in a switch log file? I remember doing a switch to mediation cdr count a few months back and the log file had lots of really fun error messages. My contract ended before I had the opportunity to investigate these, but I’m sure the operator with it’s massive expertise and dynamite team of crack RA specialists will already have dealt with this problem.

  2. In order to prevent this type of situation you should implement a reconciliation between Switch Output and Mediation Input.

    Some times the Switch output is on Binary or other format, therefore is not always possible do this reconciliation on CDRs, but is possible to count the Files at the output and the size of the Files (bytes) , do the same at mediation input and you will be able to discovery if something is not passing to mediation.

    Also, you should check the business rules at mediation, it could be that mediation is receiving the files but it is filtering or rejecting the CDRs.

    Regards!

Comments are closed.

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