Danet GmbH (Germany), in partnership with Nortel Networks (Switzerland), has delivered to Swisscom a billing system for their new VoIP Business Services: VoIP Phone and VoIP Gate.

The Business VoIP platform of Swisscom Solutions AG is composed of the carrier-grade VoIP and multimedia network components from Nortel (Nortel Communication Server 2000), and the Business Support Systems Mediation and Rating from Danet (BSS). It took Nortel and Danet less than five months to implement the Business VoIP platform from receipt of the order right through to the acceptance and delivery to the IT services department of Swisscom Solutions.

Danet's mediation tool (VMDB), which can be easily and smoothly integrated into the environment of the CS 2000 platform, was a key factor in successfully supporting the complex billing requirements of the Business VoIP product family from Swisscom Solutions. VMDB is a flexible rule-based mediation system which, apart from the core functionalities such as formatting, validation and securing of billing relevant data types (records), is also designed to preprocess the data formats for downstream processes such as duplicate check, assembly of records and standardized formats, etc. VMDB is a Next Generation mediation system that can also process records from line and packet switched networking technologies. VMDB is successfully being used by many network operators all over the world.

For the purpose of processing billing-relevant information within the downstream billing system, not only a variety of requirements which were defined in the various product specifications for Business VoIP, but also a number of different business models had to be taken into account to ensure a product-compatible billing process. Swisscom Solutions asked for the implementation of a billing system which was capable of meeting the requirements of partner settlement, retail billing and value added (VAS) billing & settlement for end customers. Danet's billing system C.I.S.S. was chosen by Swisscom Solutions to be used as billing system for the Business VoIP product family. The reasons that Swisscom opted for C.I.S.S. were its distinctive functionalities such as convergence, recon­ciliation support, rebilling and rerating capabilities, its scalability and -last but not least - its multi-client capability.