What's so hard about billing?

Andrew Hume

                       AT&T Labs -- Research
                      andrew@research.att.com
Billing in the telecommunications industry, particularly for the larger companies, is a very hard problem. There are many complicating factors, ranging from extremely high volumes of complex data to 20-year-old legacy systems to extremely complicated and arbitrary billing algorithms, that synergistically combine to create a very difficult problem. This talk will describe the billing problem from a computer science point of view; that is, it will describe the quantitative issues, the computational problems, and the operational concerns.