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This is a typical example of the telecommunications setup.

I will try to explain this picture. Imagine a telecommunication copmany - OraCell - wants to sell their services such as telephone services, broadband services, GSM services, VOIP services etc to their customers. In Oracell terms, all the services are called as products. But in the customers' terms, they are termed as services.

A CSR (Customer Service Respresentative) calls a Customer (or Customer calling the Oracell Callcenter) and enquires about a service / product. The CSR looks at all the products, describing each to the Customer, providing the choice to the customer. Customer purchases one of the product and ask the CSR to activate the same.

Please note that the grammer changes accordingly dependending on the product. For example, if it is a landline, purchasing a plan is different from installing the telephone physically at the customer's location. Both are different actions. Once the order is taken, and entered into the systems and amount is paid by the Customer for the installation charges, it is called fulfillment.

Oracell would then send a representative to the Customer's location to install the telephone, setup the appropriate equiment if needed and then activating the phone service is done. This is called provisioning of the service.

Incase of other services like :
- GSM - selling the SIM Card and activation,
- Broadband - selling the modem, setting up of the modem, issuing static/dynamic IP address and activation of the service
- VOIP - Issuing VOIP phone, issuing VOIP card, activating the service

these actions are fulfillment and provisioning of the orders taken by the CSR.

Activation (Provisioning) of the service would also mean that the system will enable the number given to the customer to all the mobile towers (Antennas) so that if the customer calls, his number would be on the line and is enabled to go across different towers.

Once the service is activated, the CRM system (or provisioning system - depends on the setup) sends a signal to the billing system to start billing.

Now, say the customer starts his first call. As he dials his first number, this will first come to OraCell's PSTN. OraCell has different switches setup already for different purposes (Switches are also called Network elements in telecommunications terminology). This switch puts the customer's call to the appropriate line and then talk to the provisioning system to know the Customer's plan. It then starts recording the information such as which number Customer has dialled, how many minutes did he talk, is it STD or ISD or local number, which area he dialled etc.

All this information is recorded into files called as CDR (Call Data Records). This file has maximum limit. Once this is filled up, another new file is written. All such CDRs are given to a software called as Mediator(Mediation). Mediator would read all the information, remove invalid entries information and pass this information to the billing systems.

Billing system would generate the bill for the customer based on his service usage, then calculate the discount according to his plan and generate the final bill and update the CRM system to display it to the Customer.

Mediation can also send the data to InterConnect systems and Data Mining databases so that appropriate reports can be generated accordingly and then looked upon by the OraCell's management.

Also, fulfillment systems looks into the inventory system to check the availability and the status of the products.

It is very hard to make the communication between all these software pieces. The Administrator needs to know the best of the softwares and also the interfaces of those software to make them communicate to each other and pass the information between them. The development, maintainability, reliability of these softwares are high since most of the times, the company develops legacy applications for such setup. Few very companies in the market are there which markets softwares for the above components.

Oracle AIA communications PIPs provides the above software pieces (not all of them) and also aids the communications between these components.

Next time, we will see how AIA helps in such scenarios.