[VoiceOps] BW RADIUS CDR interface

[Mark Lindsey]

Anyone using the Call Detail Server to get the extended call history for 
customers is using the RADIUS interface. I've heard no complaints, but 
it's not tremendously widespread yet.

Speaking of Dave's point about fraud analysis -- an advantage of 
watching the traffic in real-time is that you can do something about a 
suspicious call.  If the fraud analyzer is clever enough, it could 
accept the RADIUS accounting-start records and record the status of all 
active calls. Then if the call looks suspicious (a two-hour call to 
Jamaica from a customer who never places other International calls) then 
do an IDS-style teardown by killing the call with a spoofed BYE.

By the time you get an end-of-call CDR for a two-hour call to Jamaica, 
you're already $1000 in the hole.

But analyzing CDRs every 15 minutes is far more proactive than most ITSPs!

mark r lindsey at e-c-group.com http://e-c-group.com/lindsey +1.229.316.0013


On 2/22/10 3:32 PM, David Sarvai wrote:
> Why not just use the CDR files Broadsoft generates, and turn the FTP reporting period down low (15 minutes?)  This way, you'll get a single data dump every X minutes, which you can parse and load into your DB to report off of.
>
> The benefit of Radius is you get the data real-time.  But if you're not making real-time decisions on each call, you are wasted your money.
>
> We parsing Broadsoft CDRs hourly and then do all of our anti-fraud tests.  No need for the real-time records, as we would probably only do the fraud tests every 15 minutes anyway.
>
> Dave
>
> ________________________________________
> From: voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org [mailto:voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org] On Behalf Of Jason L. Nesheim
> Sent: Monday, February 22, 2010 2:28 PM
> To: David Hiers
> Cc: VoiceOps at voiceops.org
> Subject: Re: [VoiceOps] BW RADIUS CDR interface
>
> I think it depends what you're planning on using it for.  In my case, I wanted to use it for call traffic analysis (ex. calls volumes to NPAs, gateways, etc) and troubleshooting tools for our repair departments.  I had developed a perl module for FreeRadius that would store the CDRs into a reporting and troubleshooting database which worked out fairly well.  However, the licensing model that Broadsoft uses for the Radius interface isn't very "efficient" and has been a major problem for our deployment.  It seems Broadsoft only anticipates customers using the Radius interface for enhanced call logging and billing and prices it around that which makes it an expensive feature to use solely for network analysis.
>
> Other than the licensing issues, the interface works fairly well.  It could use some better documentation on what the VSAs are, but most of that can be reverse engineered from the CSV accounting files since the column sequences line up with the VSA numbers.
>