Tarka Titanium is the edition of Netcraft's Tarka platform that drives the network directly from the billing database. When a service is sold, Tarka provisions it: customer BGP sessions, MPLS L2VPNs and L3VPNs, BRAS shapers, VRFs, router interfaces and the IP addresses underneath them all come from the same record that generates the invoice.
Why provisioning belongs in the billing system
Most ISPs run these as two systems. Engineering configures the router, accounts raises the bill, and a spreadsheet somewhere claims to keep them in sync. Every gap between the two is a service running in the network that nobody is charging for — and in our experience auditing ISP billing across the Asia–Pacific, those gaps are common enough to fund the cost of fixing them.
Tarka Titanium removes the gap by making the billing record the source of truth for the network. A plan that isn't in Tarka doesn't get provisioned. A service that is provisioned is billed from the day it comes up, and auto-cutoff and credit control apply to it the moment an account falls behind. There is no reconciliation step because there is nothing to reconcile.
What it provisions
The network side of Tarka covers the services a wholesale or retail ISP actually sells:
- Customer BGP — session and policy provisioning for customers who bring their own address space or multihome.
- MPLS L2VPN and L3VPN — point-to-point and routed VPNs, with the VRFs that carry them, configured from the customer record.
- BRAS shapers — the speed and quota profile a customer bought is applied at the BRAS, so a plan change in the web interface is a change in the network, not a ticket to engineering.
- Router interfaces and IP management — interface provisioning plus assignment and tracking of customer addresses and ranges out of your IP space.
Router configuration is deployed over NETCONF, so Tarka works with any vendor that speaks it rather than being tied to one manufacturer's API. Netcraft has tested and proven implementations on Cisco and Juniper platforms in production.
Access technology doesn't matter much to it either: DSL, fixed wireless and leased-line services are all supported, singly or side by side on the same deployment.
Usage flows back the other way through RADIUS, SNMP, NetFlow and streaming telemetry, where Tarka rates it for billing. Provisioning pushes the service out; accounting data closes the loop.
Beyond the routers
The same platform provisions voice services and bills their CDRs, handles virtual machine provisioning and billing, and integrates with DNS, web and mail hosting. For mobile-money markets there is USSD integration, either pre-built or developed to order. Customers manage their own accounts through a self-service portal, which is where a lot of the routine workload disappears.
Tarka Titanium is developed and supported by Netcraft in Adelaide and Fiji, and runs ISPs across Australia and the Pacific. The ISP billing and provisioning page covers the billing side in more depth, or talk to us about what a deployment looks like for your network.