Method for acquiring statistics in a telephone network employing flexibly changeable rules

A method for obtaining statistical counts of telephone network events, from call detail records (CDRs) of each call, generated by an originating network element, the method comprising the steps:

• conveying routing information, regarding virtual phone numbers, to a data access point (DAP);
• receiving into buffers in a receive node, CDRs, for executing a first process that unbundles individual CDRs from the buffers and a second process that checks each CDR against a look up table stored in a database for selecting the CDRs to be tracked by the distributed processor system, the second process further obtaining from the database, preselected statistical network events to be updated for each tracked CDR;
• receiving decisional rules from the database and applying the rules to the CDRs for counting preselected statistical network events for each tracked CDR;
• formatting the count of the preselected network events into a preselected message format;
• receiving predetermined enhanced data, absent from CDRs and transferring the data to the database during a first process of a corporate node;
• signaling an end of a statistic acquisition cycle for the receive node during a second process of the corporate node:
• and
• receiving the count of each preselected statistical event in the preselected message format and making the count of each preselected statistical event available at a server for distribution to downstream users.