[VOIPSEC] RE: Call Detail Records for VOIP Calls

[Geoff Devine]

North American VoIP billing tends to conform to the GR-1100 format spit
out by any Class 5 office.  Back Office billing systems understand it
and there are a lot of operators who outsource billing to third parties
that would charge extra if billing records were delivered in some other
format.

For voice over cable, the CableLabs PacketCable architecture has all
core elements (soft switches, media gateway controllers, media gateways,
and CMTSs) report events to a record keeping server (RKS) using RADIUS
and home-brew objects added to RADIUS messages to both debug the system
and generate billing records.  Somewhere in the magic behind the RKS,
GR-1100-style billing records get kicked out.  In practice, pretty much
all soft switches kick out GR-1100 billing records and there many
deployments don't actually use an RKS.

GR-1100 lets you embed extra data in the call record.  What many vendors
do is log voice quality statistics as collected at the two endpoints of
the call.  It gives operators a handle on packet loss, delay, and jitter
attributes.

I imagine that most VoIP PBX implementations use a more PBX-like CDR
format.  There are dozens of permutations but most look something like
the old AT&T Dimension PBX CDR record.  I haven't dealt with PBX billing
record formats in quite a while but it's unlikely that anybody is going
to re-invent the wheel.  Pretty much all CDR systems kick out a record
when the call starts, when the call ends, whenever the user invokes a
feature, and periodically when the call has been up for a long period of
time.  In the dark ages, this went out an RS-232 serial port but
interconnect these days is more likely to use telnet or FTP.

Geoff

----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Robert Moskowitz <rgm at icsalabs.com>
Subject: Re: [VOIPSEC] RE: Call Detail Records for VOIP Calls
To: Mark Teicher <mht3 at earthlink.net>,voipsec at voipsa.org
Message-ID: <6.2.1.2.2.20050415173120.0385cbd0 at localhost>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed

At 03:50 PM 4/12/2005, Mark Teicher wrote:
>Has anyone dealt with configuration of Call Detail Records for VOIP
calls?
>What is the logging requirements for Sarbanes-Oxley regarding how CDR 
>records are to be kept and what format??

How is this any different than CDR from the company PBX?

>Can call detail records be split into incoming and outgoing calls based
on 
>trunk groups routing voice traffic and then re-assembled for
investigative 
>reasons?
>What about parsing through call detail records for unusual calling 
>patterns or duration based calls ??
>
>