Antenor Challenge
Every call, message and network event in a carrier’s infrastructure produces a call detail record. CDRs are the raw truth of a telecom business: billing runs on them, interconnection settlement runs on them, fraud investigation and regulatory retention require any individual record to be retrievable long after it was written. At national-carrier volume that means terabytes of structured records, growing every day, with two conflicting requirements: ingest everything without falling behind the network, and answer point queries fast enough for a billing dispute or a fraud case.
General-purpose relational databases of the era could not hold both ends of that trade-off at this scale. Storage cost alone made naive approaches non-viable.
Solution
Antenor’s engineers built Teramanager, a storage and retrieval system purpose-built for CDR workloads. Instead of forcing telecom data through a generic database, the design started from the workload’s real shape: append-heavy continuous ingestion, records that never change once written, and queries dominated by subscriber and time-range lookups. That allowed an architecture optimized for exactly those patterns: sustained high-throughput ingestion from switching infrastructure, aggressive compression to keep terabyte-scale retention affordable, and indexing built around how billing, interconnection and fraud teams actually search.
The system was deployed by Siemens at TOT, Thailand’s national telecom operator, and at Movicom BellSouth.
Stack
- Purpose-built ingestion pipeline sustaining continuous CDR feeds from network switches
- Compressed, append-optimized storage layout designed for immutable telecom records
- Subscriber and time-range indexing serving billing, settlement and fraud queries
Results
- Sub-second search across hundreds of billions of records (US-scale billions), the volume telecom operators accumulate retaining call history for legal purposes
- In production at two national telecom operators, in two markets: Thailand (TOT, deployed with Siemens) and Argentina (Movicom BellSouth)
- Terabyte-scale CDR retention with historical records retrievable on demand for billing disputes, interconnection settlement and regulatory or legal requests
- The massive-scale consultation ran on XLBase, the same proprietary search engine behind Antenor’s legal case-law retrieval and national directories
