I have always enjoyed working with AT&T returns (I am not exactly sure what that says about me – that I enjoy working with any call detail record legal returns and sifting through thousands of lines of data – but it is part of why I ended up at Hawk Analytics). The format has been consistent since the Cricket/AT&T merger in 2014, offering the uniform time zones, (everything in UTC (Universal Time Coordinated)), a lengthy retention period (7-10 years), pdf formats, logically labeled column headers, and historical cell site information embedded within the report. The reports boast a unique way of presenting historical CDR (Call Detail Record) and cell site location information compared to other cellular providers, and the returns give the analyst some great insights into user activities.
This is not to say that AT&T returns are without idiosyncrasies. If you have been working with the CDR returns for a while you may be familiar with some of them: A data point in the middle of the ocean off the coast of Africa; missing sector information; and, the parsing of call, text, and data information into autonomous sections – rather than a running chronological picture of the communications. I have answered questions pertaining to these issues and more during my time on the Hawk Analytics Customer Success Team but have had many discussions about the data usage portion of the reports. Hopefully, understanding three key ideas pertaining to the data information will help you be more efficient in your casework.
