Call record analysis

It is a fact that the UK telecommunications market is becoming more and more complex. This complexity, particularly in the interconnect/regulatory and marketing areas poses a growing challenge to the switched network design and planning engineer. Before starting to think about planning the future it is essential to understand current calling behaviour. Some information about calling patterns is available from standard statistics generated by telephone exchanges, but this tends to be limited to high level counters at a route or cell level. Fortunately there is a much more detailed source of information about calling patterns. This is produced from almost all types of switch as the call record used for billing purposes. This paper describes some simple but powerful software tools and methods which have been used for manipulating and summarising this low level data to provide a whole range of useful results.