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Sigtran Revenue Assurance | Switchblade
Overview
A carrier class Revenue Assurance and Telecom Billing platform for real-time network monitoring, enabling carriers to increase monitor Sigtran Signalling traffic, increase revenues and improve quality by immediately identifying and correcting income shortfalls and service operational issues.
The Switchblade’s network probe extracts Sigtran Signalling Traffic from the network and generates Sigtran SS7 Call Detail Records (CDRs) to a secure secure database. The CDRs are accessible to a client PC with a web browser.
- Sigtran SS7 Revenue Assurance web application for analyzing CDRs.
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux for 24/7 operation.
- Enterprise database.
- ITU SS7 ISUP / NUP International and National signaling standards supported.
- Sigtran Network Probe with 1 Gigabit link capacity.
- Real-time display of calls-in-progress.
- User friendly interface for Fraud Monitoring, Statistics, Billing and Channel Usage.
- Rapid Return on Investment.
Key System Functionality
Revenue Assurance
- Fraud Monitoring.
- Increased Revenue by Stopping Fraud.
- Checking the accuracy of settlements between International Carriers.
- Billing Verification: Collection and Reconciliation / Verification of CDRs.
- Billing for SS7 use (e.g. GSM Roaming services for other Carriers).
- Customer Care: Preventing Churn.
- Customer Care: Identification of calling patterns for major customers.
Performance & Maintenance Management
- Performance Statistics: ASR (Answer/Seize Ratio), BSR (Busy/Seize Ratio) and PDD (Post Dialing Delay).
- Real-time Call Tracing.
- Trouble Shooting.
- Identification of Faulty Routes and misconfigured routers.
- Identification of Network congestion.
Sigtran Network Probe
The Sigtran Network Probe connects to the Ethernet links where the Sigtran signaling traffic is monitored. The Sigtran Network Probe consists of two parts; the first part is a Cisco Enterprise Switch configured to pass TCP/IP traffic transparently and also to pass Sigtran signaling traffic data onto a monitoring port (port mirroring). The second part is an Ethernet port (in the Switchblade server) connected to the monitoring port on the Cisco Switch. This port is configured to receive all network traffic and then to filter signaling traffic out of all the packets received. This two-part monitoring configuration allows fully non-intrusive monitoring of the Sigtran signaling traffic data.
The Sigtran signaling traffic data is streamed to the Switchblade server, where it is decoded and SS7 CDRs generated. The SS7 CDRs are written to the database for storage and analysis.
Switchblade Server
The Switchblade Server hosts an Enterprise Database Server and also operates as a web-server running the SS7 Revenue Assurance application. The database stores the CDRs and executes SQL queries from the SS7 Revenue Assurance application running on the web browser on the client PCs.
The Switchblade Server typically is a rack mounted Dual CPU Server with a 500 to 1000 GByte Hard Disk running Enterprise Linux and uses ECC memory for reliability. The Enterprise Linux operating system and Database Server are multi-user.
Switchblade PCs
The Client PCs run the SS7 Revenue Assurance application in a web browser and connect to the Switchblade Server over an Ethernet LAN. The Switchblade web-server is used for accessing the CDR database and for the real-time display of calls-in-progress.
A comprehensive set of search queries can be executed from the web-server via the client PC, the queries extract and display call statistics including accumulated minutes.
Useful examples include:
- Group Calls by A or B Number.
- Group Calls by Carrier.
- Group Calls by Calling Party Category.
- Group Calls by Release Code.
Revenue Assurance Manager
The investigation of revenue loss varies from call-back services through to fraudulent operation. The Switchblade offers the Carrier detection facilities for a wide range of fraud and access to CDRs to identify the parties involved. The Revenue Assurance Manager can applying action trees to identify the patterns used for these fraudulent calls and by responding appropriately can restore the revenue streams.
The CDR data provided is detailed and includes the time of call, the duration and status, i.e. Answered, A Number, B Number and additional information including Calling Party Category (CPC), Post Dialing Delay (PDD), Release Code (RC), etc.
Network Manager
The performance figures allow the Network Manager to respond quickly to requests for reports on customer access difficulty where the problems are network related. The database can also provide a measure of the efficiency of the maintenance effort and an identification of resource requirements.
