ISP billing - data collection, correlation, and billing

Fri Jul 14 18:47:49 UTC 2017

On the HFC / CMTS side of things we have IPDR which I believe has some open source collectors out there. I'm not sure that IPDR is used much outside of the HFC world though.

Luke Guillory
Vice President – Technology and Innovation

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-----Original Message-----
From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces at nanog.org] On Behalf Of Sean Pedersen
Sent: Friday, July 14, 2017 1:41 PM
To: nanog at nanog.org
Subject: ISP billing - data collection, correlation, and billing

I went back a few years in the archives and found a few odd references, but not much discussion. I'm curious what some other approaches are to usage-based billing, both the practice of generating/correlating data and the billing itself.

We bill based on use/95th percentile and our system is rudimentary on its best day. We use SNMP and interface descriptions to generate data and correlate it with customers. This works for the most part, but leaves a lot to be desired.

Ours is one method, and I've seen others who use NetFlow data in a similar fashion, with the assumption that the NetFlow data is correlated either via IP address or source interface.

Most of the systems I've seen are full-fledged CRM, billing, and OSS, which is a little overkill for us at the moment. I think we would have issues trying to integrate such a multi-headed beast into our organization at this time.

What methods do you use to collect and correlate data?

What systems, if any, do you use?

I'm a little in the dark as the billing/OSS side of things is outside of my normal scope and would appreciate any recommendations.

Thanks!