As the market place and customer demands change, Service Providers who can quickly rollout new services and actively bill for them will find themselves with a competitive advantage.  The Billing Mediation interface aims to reduce the time to market for new services hence providing a faster time to revenue. 

The Billing Mediation interface utilizes J2EE and XML technologies to facilitate the development and integration of mediation and billing software components.  By using the Billing Mediation interface, Service Providers can buy products from different sources and integrate them with minimal effort. 

The Billing Mediation interface supports querying, suspension and resumption of billing/usage data record collection activities.  It provides a standard interface between the billing data shources and the Billing Systems, i.e., the network and service elements, the mediation function and the Billing System for both 2.5 and 3G networks.  Its applicability is not limited to wireless specific domains.

The Billing Mediation interface facilitates the ad-hoc collection of Usage Data Records via queries in near real-time.  It supports the formulation of a query filter with parameters that are applicable to the desired type of Usage Data Records in question.