Data comparison
Tariscope contains a subsystem that compares the results of the Tariscope rating with the results of rating from your telecom service provider.
Why should you compare the results of rating?
A comparison of the results of the call rating received from your telecom service provider with the data of Tariscope enables to:
- find out errors of the call accounting and call rating of both the telecom service provider or / and Tariscope,
- supplement the Tariscope data according to the data of the service provider,
- reveal inaccuracy of settings of rates or PBX parameters,
- estimate the data for mutual settlement, in case you are a telecom service provider and use the Tariscope Provider edition.
Such a comparison can be performed manually, but with large volumes of telephone traffic it is a very complex task. Besides the comparison without Tariscope can have additional complexities that are described below.
Possible difficulties when processing the file of a service provider
A telecom service provider can provide the results of call rating in a variety of formats, depending on which format is used in his billing system. A list of formats, which are found and suitable for processing and analysis, is given below:
- Delimited text files. This is one of the most popular formats.
- Text files with fixed width fields.
- dBase files (*.dbf).
- Microsoft Excel files (*.xls, *.xlsx).
- Microsoft Access databases.
This does not exhaust the possible list of used file formats.
Files can also vary the encoding, separator lines, data format, order and number of fields.
The Tariscope Compare program that is a subsystem of the Tariscope comparison has broad capabilities to configure the appropriate fields and their formats. This greatly facilitates the comparison process.
Possible difficulties of the comparison
Due to the fact that a telecom service provider and customer have different telephone equipment in most cases and the equipment has different settings, as a result, with the high possibility the call records from the provider will not fully correspond to the call records from the customer. Differences can be in date, time of a call beginning, call duration and dialed number. There are situations where all these parameters are differ:
- times of a call beginning can be differed because of the lack of a time synchronization and accuracy of the system timers,
- durations can be different because of there are the different beginning times of accounting of rated seconds,
- dialed numbers can be different because of there can be a difference in the routing and translation of a dialed number between telephone systems.
Therefore, for search of conformity of calls, the Tariscope Compare uses an adaptive algorithm that can detect a time shift and the mean deviation of the call duration. The search is performed in a time interval, which is a short-range interval to the desired one, when the fully appropriate call is absence. For the exact search by a dialed number, all dialed numbers are converted to a common international format E.164. The algorithm allows to reach a high precision of the search. As a rule it is possible to reach more than 95% match.
The next possible problem of the comparison is that what a call information can be divided on the several records in the CDR file. This can happen when subscribers use a variety of additional call services, such as a Call Transfer, Conference, as well as in other cases which are specific to a particular PBX. To solve this problem, Tariscope Compare seeks the related records pertaining to a single call.
Thus, Tariscope provides effective data comparison and allows the user to get an objective assessment of the made calls and the cost of them.
You can find information about other features of Tariscope Enterprise on the page.
You can find information about other features of Tariscope Provider on the page.
