IPDR, why does it matter?
IPDR stands for Internet Protocol Detail Record, which is being developed as a set of standards by the TMForum. By providing application, service, location, user, and network-based information about internet usage, IPDR is intended to be used as an enabler for providing and billing next-generation services.
To those of you with telecom chops, this will sound exactly like Call Detail Records (CDRs) and it should. Having spent the first five years of my career on the carrier side, I cut my teeth parsing and processing call detail records from all of the major North American ILECs and CLECs to provide bills for our own customers back in my Servisense/Alticomm days.
So, when we had billing errors, where did they come from? The biggest errors that I saw would be from CDRs that had contradictory information. As carriers were pressured to provide more creative and value-driven services, they would create CDRs that would specify a new service or establish a new price for each call depending on the package or bundle du jour. We would end up processing CDRs that weren't sure if they were supposed to be standard pricing, custom pricing, or dependent on other context within the call and would get pricing errors as a result. Just check out the ATT EDI 811 implementation guide if have the masochistic desire to go through 300 pages of processing and implementing call detail records in the old Ameritech region.
In any case, how does this relate to the new IPDRs? As IPDR gains in popularity and the service providers start getting more creative with their services, one can only imagine how this can get more complex as location-based services, peak network times, advertising requests, SLAs, and other internet-based demands are potentially rolled into the IPDR. Unless TMForum is able to provide an airtight standard that fits all of the needs of service providers and predicts the most popular services and marketing approaches over the next few years, we are looking at a new area of expense management that will require the same types of expertise and processing capabilities that currently exist in Telecom Expense Management.
I look forward both to seeing how the service providers go to market as IPDRs develop over the next few years. TEM vendors who treat IP traffic as part of their domain and do not simply give up internet traffic to the application and network management vendors will find themselves well-prepared to manage future telecom lifecycle management needs for businesses and high-traffic individuals.
