Telecom Billing is a process of;

• collecting usage (CDR files),
• aggregating it (Mediation),
• applying required charges (Billing) and
• finally generating invoices (BFS) for the customers.

Telecom Billing process also includes receiving and recording payments from the customers.

How we do it?
(Thanks to T2 confluence - good old ARECA)

Current Architecture

Rating Process

How the process is threaded?

Billing Process

Billing System Integration to TT

Billing Systems

Needed for more complex charging scenarios, flexibility.

 

Most desired features of a billing system;

• Rating & billing,
  rates usage and produces monthly bills.
• Payment processing,
• Credit control and collections,
• Disputes and adjustments,
• Pre-pay and post-pay services,
• Multilingual & multiple currencies,
• Inter-carrier settlements, -OLO
• Products & services, -product catalog
• Discount applications. -promosyonlar

Billing Types

Pre-pay Billing: pay in advance then start using a service. Do not receive invoice. Charged in real time by highly available billing systems called Intelligent Network.
E.g. 25TL/month for 2GB, 1000 min, 1000 SMS

 

Post-pay Billing: conventional billing.

Interconnect Billing: related to inter-carrier.
E.g. Avea to Turkcell

 

Roaming Charging: When you go abroad.

 

Convergent Billing: Tek fatura, yeni Turk Telekom.

Billing System Vendors

System Website Convergys IRB www.convergys.com

Amdocs Ensemble www.amdocs.com

AMS Tapestry www.amsinc.com/telecom

Kenan Arbor www.kenan.com

Saville Systems www.savillesys.com

Single View www.intecbilling.com

Portal Infranet www.intecbilling.com

Ericsson IN www.ericsson.com

Nokia Siemens IN www.nokiasiemensnetworks.com

Alternatively; Open source billing systems

Typical Billing Process:

Considering above system architecture:-> After a call is made or you can say a usage is generated by the end customer, the mediation system gathers usage data from the network switch and builds a call-detail record (CDR). This CDR must contain A party number and B party number, the start and end date & times.

The CDR is then stored until it can be rated. To rate the call, the CDR is examined to see if the call is, for example, a 800 number, a local call that is covered by a local-area calling plan, international call or a toll call. Information such as the time of the call was placed and city code or country codes are used to calculate the rate for the call.

Once each call is rated, this information is stored until the invoice is run, usually once a month. When the invoice is run, other nonusage charges, such as discounts or monthly fees, can be applied to the bill or sometime called invoice.

There could be rating time discount or billing time discount, different payments done by the customers, different adjustments given, all this information contributes in final invoice generation.

This information is then converted in a format, which can be printed in a readable form. Finally, the envelope is printed, stuffed with enclosures, and mailed to the end customer.

Billing System Requirements

• Customer interface management
• Order management
• Sales and marketing
• Rate plans and rating
• Discounting
• Invoicing
• Credit control & collection
• Multilingual support
• Multiple currencies
• Partner revenue management
• Problem handling
• Performance reporting
• Installation and Maintenance
• Auditing and security

A good billing system should be;

 

• Accelerating time-to-market for new service launches.

• Enabling convergent view of customers and products.

• Supporting cost-efficient architectural scalability.

• Enabling partner relationship management and settlement.

• Reducing total cost of ownership.

What is a 'Product'?

A product is a logical or physical entity, which can be sold out to an end customer by the operators. This could be a mobile phone, internet connection, Voice call connection, VPN, Video on demand, Digital TV connection, etc.

What is a 'Service'?

When we talk about them from marketing point of view, as such there is no difference in between products and services because most of the times both are used interchangeably by different billing and marketing experts.

Products may be;

• Real objects (a mobile phone, for example).

• Services (a call waiting service on a telephone system, for example).

• More abstract concepts (a service level agreement, for example).

Product families;

Related products can be grouped together.
E.g. Telephony services, Cable TV, Internet, Leased line.

Group of products, i.e. packages

Many times, operators bundle more than one product into a single group and sell them as complete package. There are billing systems, which support bundling of various types of products together as a package, which can be offered at discounted price.

More on Products;

• Product Attributes
• Product Event Types

What is tariff?

Definition of rental & usage charges for different products and services.

There could be different types of charges to be applied for a/1/single product and associated services.

For a given product, an operator can define one or more of the following charges;

• Product initiation charges; one time,welcome charge:)
• Product periodic charges; monthly, bi-monthly etc.
• Product termination charges; one time at cancellation
• Product suspension charges
  • Product suspension periodic charges
• Product re-activation charges
• Product usage charges; basic charge depending on usage. e.g. call per minute, download per MB etc.

 

 

Charge customer for everything, yaaay!

More charges..

Charges taken in advance before providing the services are called in-advance charging and charges taken after providing the services are called in-arrear charges.

Billing system should provide an option to configure particular prices to be pro-ratable-kist uygulanir- as well as non-proratable-kist uygulanmaz- and let the operator choose what suites them best.

Refundable & Non-Refundable Charges;

E.g., Operator is charging a customer in advance for the whole month, but customer leaves in the middle of the month after using a service for 10 days.

Charge overriding;

an option to override base prices at the time they are given to the customer.

For example, for a particular product base prices in the catalogue are defined $30 per month but customer is not ready to pay $30 per month, and based on some bargaining, he is ready to pay $25 per month. In such situation, customer service representative (CSR) should be able to override defined base price $30 and add them as $25 at the time of customer creation in the system.

Revenue Segregation by Revenue Codes;

All the operators would like to know how much they have earned using a particular product, its rental, suspension or usage, etc. REPORT GENERATION?

Tariffs Classification;

All the products and services can have different tariff plans, which can be offered to different -credit-classes of people ranging from general class to VIP class.

Parameters for Usage Charges;

• Calls in daytime, usually called peak time, will be charged on higher rate and in night time, i.e., off peak time rate will be relatively low.

• If calls are terminating within the same network, usually called on-net calls, would be charged at relatively low prices.

• Calls during weekend, i.e., Sat and Sun would be charged at low prices.

• Calls to a particular destination would be charged at high prices.

• Calls during some festival would be charged at special prices.

• Data download from a particular site would be free of cost.

• Sending SMS to a particular code would be charged at high rate.

• Calls with-in a particular group of numbers, usually called closed user group (CUG), would be charged at zero prices.

• Sending international or national MMS would be charged at the same prices.

Customer is a 'legal entity';

• Individual,
• Company,

who, takes the products and services offered by the service provider and responsible for paying the bills.

 

Customer acquisition process is handled using a system called Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

A customer, who is purchasing the products & services, needs to be activated in the system and for this, various details about the customer are required;

• The customer may have to fill up an application form providing personal details.

• Validate the identity of the customer in order to prevent fraud.

• Service Provider needs to carry out a credit check on the customer and assign appropriate credit class based on credit history and monthly income, etc.

• Offer appropriate products, which are provisioned at the network to provide the service.

ORKA

Once the customer is acquired, it is required to manage and retain the customer which involves;

• Interacting & communicating with the customer for sales and collection activities.

• These interactions can be recorded in different formats like Notes, voice recordings, etc. This data can be used to analyze the behavior of the customer and helps the service provider to better services in order to retain the customer

• Handling trouble tickets raised by the customer against any problem they face with the network or invoice, etc. This data can also be used to analyze the behavior of the customer and helps the service provider for the betterment of the services in order to retain the customer.

• Handling any bill disputes and adjustments raised in between the customer and service provider.

Customer Types

Mobile

Fixed

Pre-paid

Post-paid

A customer starts generating usage at Network as soon as he/she starts using the products and services sold by the operator.

What is an event?

An event is a single billable occurrence of product usage, typically captured electronically by a network.

For example, when a mobile phone user makes a telephone call, an event is generated which contains information about that phone call, such as the call duration, the time of day the call was made, and the number that was called.

What is a CDR?

An event along with all its attributes is called Call Detail Record (CDR).

These raw CDRs/UDRs are in turn converted by the mediation system into a format understandable by the Billing System.

There could be different network elements controlling the services and producing different types of CDRs; for example, for GSM telephony;

• Voice calls are captured by the MSC (Mobile Switching Centre).

• SMS traffic is captured by the SMSC.

• Data traffic is captured by the GGSN.

• MMS traffic is captured by the MMSC.

• Roaming CDRs are captured by roaming partner's switching element.

Above diagram shows the Network elements capturing Usage data and sending Raw UDRs to the Mediation System and finally to the Billing System for rating and billing.

CDR keeps usage details along with various other useful information;

• Calling Party (A number) .

• Called Party (B number).

• Call Start (date and time).

• How long the call was (duration).

• Call Type (Voice, SMS, Data etc).

• A unique sequence number identifying the record.

CDR may keep these additional information;

• The identifier of the telephone exchange .

• The result of the call (whether it was answered, busy, etc.) .

• Trunk or route used to connect the call .

• Any fault condition encountered .

• Indicators that note the use of features such as call forwarding, three-way calling.

• Any facilities used during the call, such as call waiting or call diversion .

• Various other attributes depending on requirement.

CDR processing;

• The Mediation System collects CDRs from different network elements in different formats.
  • Various network elements generate CDRs in ASN.1 format and some network elements have their own proprietary format of CDRs.
• The Mediation System processes all the CDRs and converts them into a format compatible to the down stream system, which is usually a Billing System.
• There may be a requirement to filter out all the calls, which are having call duration less than 5 seconds, the best place to filter out such types of calls will be at Mediation System level.
• if some extra information is required in the CDRs which is critical to billing, then Mediation System will help in providing such information based on some other attributes available within the CDRs.
• Once the collected CDRs are processed, Mediation System pushes all the CDRs to the Billing System using FTP because usually Mediation and Billing systems run on different machines.

Rate is the charge/price for the occurrence of an event.

Examples of rate include charge for the duration of the telephone call: For example: "0.40 INR per 1 minute" or a specific quantity.

Rating is the process of determining the charge/price of individual events.

For example, the price for 2 minutes call is 0.80 INR with the rate of 0.40 INR per minute.

Rating engine receives the events in the form of data records called as Call Detail Records (CDRs)

A CDR is a string of data that contains call information such as call date and time, call length, calling party, called party, etc., which are used to rate the events.

Basic functions of Rating/Rating Engine;

• Accepting CDRs from the Mediation System or other service providers or roaming partners in case of roaming usage.

• Validating the CDRs and eliminate duplicate records. These duplicate events are stored in a db table for later verification.

• To determine the customer account that has to be charged for the event. Here, Rate process picks up the event source ( Mobile Number or IP Address, etc.) and checks the database to verify if this event source is associated with any account. This step is called Event Guiding.

• If the event can not be guided, then this event will be rejected and can be put in suspense category. These rejected events are stored in a database table for later verification.

• Calculate the cost/price of the event as per the rating tariff (also referred as rate plan).

• To apply any applicable rating time discounts. This could be first five minutes free and after that call will be charged at normal rate. Such type of discounts are called rating time discounts.

• To store the rated event in the database for a billing purpose or send it to the external system for billing.

• The customer's information determines the rate plan (rating tariff) to use in charge/price calculation.
• The rating engine uses the rating tables, and the event information from the CDRs (e.g. distance, time of day, location of the call, duration or volume of the event, etc.) to calculate the actual charge for each call.

A duplicate event is defined as any unbilled event that relates to another unbilled event in all of the following ways;

• The account numbers are identical.

• The event sources are identical.

• The event type IDs are identical.

• The event dates and times are identical.

 

Other reasons that may cause duplicate events;

• A failure of the mediation system's filtering mechanism.

• Coding errors in the mediation system software.

• A repetition of all or part of an event file being passed to the Rating Engine.

When Billing System encounters a problem with a particular event, the offending event is rejected. The cause of problems may be;

• The event itself.

• The rate plan.

• Customer and account data.

• Configuration data.

3 main reasons for rejecting events;

• Parsing errors prevent the Billing System from reading the information in the event detail record. A parsing error may occur because the data in the event record is corrupt or in the wrong format.

• Unguideable errors prevent Geneva(Billing System) from identifying the event source or account associated with the event. An unguideable error may occur because the event source does not yet exist in the Billing System database.

• Unrateable errors prevent Billing System from calculating a cost for the event. An unrateable error may occur because of problems with a rate plan.

All the rejected events are posted to a special account, which is called internal account or suspense account and these rejected events are called suspense events. Finance department keeps track of all the rejected events and count them as a part of revenue loss. IT department always gives lot of attention to resolve rejected events and rate them properly to save revenue.

If a rejected event cannot be fixed and the Operator does not want to post it to an internal account, the event can be discarded. When an event is discarded, it will not be submitted to the Rating Engine and no further attempts to rate it will take place.

Real time rating;

Real-time rating is the process of taking events as they occur and rating them immediately, with as little delay as possible between event generation and costing.

Real-time rating can be contrasted with file-based rating, where event details are stored in a file buffer for hours, days, or weeks before the whole file is finally rated.

Real-time system processes include e-commerce transactions and data download. Any application where events must be rated and applied quickly to a customer's account is a suitable candidate for real-time rating.

Rerating Events;

• An error in the rate plan used resulted in incorrectly priced events.

• The events were loaded against the wrong account (due to incorrect event source registration).

• An existing rate plan was replaced at some point between the last and the next billing dates.

• The rate plan, price plan, or event source for a product has been retrospectively changed.

 

The process for rerating events is very simple and it is as follows;

• Unload/Unrate all the events from the database using provided utility. Most of the billing system provides a utility to unload or unrate all the rated events.

• Fix the problem wherever it lies.

• Resubmit the events for rating by the Rating Engine.

Partial Events:

Partial events allow a customer's balance to be maintained while an event is in progress.

(KMSH/FUS)

 

For example, in case of long data download, mediation system will keep sending partial events to the billing system so that billing system keep rating them instead of waiting for event completion, and as soon as customer's credit limit breach, account will be barred and Network element will be informed to terminate the call.

-this is what Zing wants in the first place-

Thresholds and Actions;

The Rating Engine can automatically check to see if any rating time thresholds, including rating time discount thresholds, have been reached.

 

Rating time thresholds help in protecting operators from lots of revenue loss. For example, a customer may not be willing to pay more than his credit limit, in such case, it becomes necessary to terminate customer's call as soon as it reaches to credit limit threshold.

 

If it is required to take rating time action, then it is important to have as much as real time rating as possible.

Billing; is the aggregation of all non-recurring, periodic, and chargeable events on an account-by-account basis.

It is also the calculation of all outstanding charges and available discounts and bonuses.

 

The output from billing process is a stream of tagged bill data that can be used to create a bill on paper, disk, or any other media. Billing Engine, which is part of the Billing System, creates invoices.

 

 

The following diagram shows the basic diagram of the Billing Engine and associated functions;

Billing Engine picks up an account due to generate a billing and following associated information to generate invoice data;

• All the rated CDRs for the customer within the month of invoice.

• All types of charges (initiation, installation, periodic, suspension, termination, etc.,) applicable for the customer's product and services.

• If there is any refund or any other charges applicable.

• Total outstanding from previous bills. (onceki aydan odenmemis)

• Total payments made by the customer in the given month.

• Total adjustment passed in favor of the customer or against the customer.

• Total discount given to the customer.

• Total taxes applicable on customer's usage and rental charges.

• Billing configuration parameter required to run the Billing Engine; for example, payment due date, etc.

 

Billing Engine produces raw data having all the information required to generate a final bill and this raw data can be used to generate a final invoice to be sent to the end customer.

Bill Cycles

When a customer is added into the Billing System, system assigns the customer a predefined Bill Cycle. A bill cycle is a date on which Billing Engine runs and produces bills for a set of customers.

 

If there are many customers, then they are divided into different billing cycles. For example, a group of customers can have billing data as 1st of every month; another can have the billing date of 15th of every month.

 

If customer is assigned to run a bill on 1st of the month, this would be called customer's nominal bill date. But because of various reasons, many times bill run becomes delayed and actual bill gets generated on a later date, this would be called actual bill date.

Bill Types

Initiation bill, Periodic bill, Interim bill, Suspension bill, Final bill, Post-final bill, Credit note, Summary Statements

 

Billing Modes

• Test Billing; These bills are useful to make sure that system is working fine and test after making changes to bill templates or tariffs.
• Production Billing; This mode is used to produce normal production bills.
  Once a production bill is generated, Billing Engine updates customer's profile in the database with the total outstanding balance to be paid by the customer, and next bill date, etc.

 

Billing Engine assigns different invoice numbers to all the production bills which help in keeping track of different payments made against the invoice.

Bill Suppression

There may be a situation when it is not worth to generate a bill and better to suppress the bill.

• Suppressing bills for accounts with zero (zero activity bills) or very little value (small bills).

• A particular type of bill can also be suppressed if multiple bill types are requested/scheduled at the same time and therefore preventing unnecessary bills from being sent to the customer.
   

Exceptional Bills

Examples of possible exceptional bills are unusually high bills or bills, which exceed the account's credit limit by a set multiplier.

 

Bill Itemization

An itemized bill means giving complete details of all the calls made by the customer.

• All discounts alter (most commonly to reduce) the price to be paid for a set of events and/or products.
• Discount is a way of giving customer money off.
• Discounts can be calculated either during the rating process or the billing process;
  • Rating Time Discount: All the discounts given at the time of rating process. These discounts can be given at usage only. An example of rating time discount is "5% off the first hour of all international calls".
  • Billing Time Discount: All the discounts given at the time of billing process. These discounts can be given on rated usage as well as on product & service charges. An example of billing time discount is "5% off if you spend over $15 within a month".

Simple Discount Types;

• Cross Product Discounts;
  • "10 SMS free if more than $30 is spent on mobile calls". Here mobile calls determine the discount and SMS product gets the discounts.
• Tiered Discounts;
  • 0% off for a spend of $0-$100 threshold or 0-100 events threshold, 5% off for a spend of $100-$200 threshold or 100-200 events threshold etc.

 

• Volume Discounts;
  • 5% off for a spend of $100 or 100 events, etc. As seen, the greater the spend, the more the discount.

• Tax Discounts;
  • Tax discounts provide an alternative method for dealing with some tax exemptions. They are calculated and applied when the account is billed.

Discount Periods & Proration-kist;

Most discounts have a discount period associated with them which can be any number of days, weeks, or months. This period can be used in three ways;

• To specify the time over which a threshold value is meant to be reached.

• To specify the frequency with which an absolute discount is meant to be applied.

• To specify how often the highest usage is determined for discounts with highest usage filters attached.

 

Discounts could be pro-rated and non-prorated based on the requirement.

Bonus Schemes;

Bonus schemes are methods of giving the customer free events, where the number of free events is determined by the prior usage of or charge for one or more products over a period of time (for example, the previous year).

 

For example, "Take the Superdeal telephony package and get $10 of free calls for every three hours of international calls made in the previous quarter."

Calling Circle/User Groups (CUG);

Calling circle Groups define a relationship between users, who are modelled as members and (by default) non-members.

 

Within this model, a call made by a member of the circle to another member of the circle would be priced using a different rate to that applied to a non-member (or associate) making the same call.

There are Billing Systems available which provide internal Bill Formatting tools. If a billing system does not provide capable tool to generate formatted bills, then there are third party tools available like DOC1, is one of the most commonly used tools.

Sample Invoice

There may be two possible ways to charge an end customer;

• In-Advance - prepaid: An operator charges the customers in advance before providing the service. This leads to less customer satisfaction but operator is more secure from revenue point of view.

• In-Arrears - postpaid: An operator pushes himself on risk and charges the customer at end of every month after providing required services. This leads to more customer satisfaction but operator is on a risk of collecting less revenue.

 

If a customer's income is $10,000/month, then operator can provide him their services very easily up to $1000 - $2000 but for the same operator it would be difficult to provide him a service, which would cost almost $10,000/month because in such situation, it would be difficult for the customer to make monthly payment.

 

Operators define different credit classes, which they use to classify their customers and associate different credit and collection actions.

The credit class defines a category of the customer and associated risk of revenue can be taken with that customer;

• VIP Credit Class: This can be assigned to VIP customers and would have very high value of credit limit.

• General Public Class: This is the most common credit class and would have almost $100 or $200 credit limit.

• Segment Specific Class: These classes can be defined based on different segments like police, military or bank officers, etc. Operator can define credit limit based on their comfort.

 

In our case ETC is a credit class.

What is Dispute?

A dispute is a record of a query about an amount of money on an account. Normally, a dispute will be recorded when a customer queries some aspect of their bill. Disputes can be raised:

• Against an invoice on an account.

• Against a particular rated event on the account. For example, if a customer disputes a particular pay-per-view TV event due to a power cut.

What is Adjustment?

An adjustment is a method of crediting or debiting an account with an arbitrary amount of money. Adjustments can be lodged against either an account as a whole or against a particular rated event on that account.

 

 

If a dispute is accepted, an adjustment is created to credit the account with the disputed amount. Adjustments should not affect the balance of an account until they are approved. Adjustments with a status of pending approval do not affect billing or collections.

Post-paid Scenairo

Pre-paid Scenairo

• MVNO stands for Mobile Virtual Network Operator. A mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) is a company that provides mobile phone services but does not have its own licensed frequency allocation of radio spectrum, nor does it necessarily have all of the infrastructure required to provide mobile telephone service.

 

• MVNE stands for Mobile Virtual Network Enabler, which is a company that provides services to mobile virtual network operators such as billing, network element provisioning, administration, operations, support of base station subsystems and operations support systems(OSS), and provision of back end network elements, to enable provision of mobile network services like cellular phone connectivity.

 

• An MVNO in reality is a reseller of mobile products and services from an actual operator but under a different brand.
  • Private label

• For example, there is an operator A(Verizon, Sprint etc.) having all the infrastructure including network, switches, billing systems, provisioning system and customer care systems, etc. Now if someone(Zing) wants to start a telecom business by doing some minimum investment, then MVNO is the option to proceed.

 

• An MVNO will buy services in bulk from a well-established operator(Verizon, Sprint etc.) and change the brand name(Private label) as per their convenience and market those products and services as an operator. Actual operator would remain transparent from the end customer and customer will have feeling like to be an end customer of MVNO.

 

• Depending on the situation, an MVNO can buy one or more infrastructure components from an operator and pay them accordingly. For example, an MVNO may like to use only network from the operator or an MVNO can use network and charging system from the operator and rest of the components like customer care, provisioning, etc., can be set up by the MVNO.

• MVNO's have full control over the SIM card, branding, marketing, billing, and customer care operations.

 

• The first commercially successful MVNO in the UK was Virgin Mobile UK,[3] launched in the United Kingdom in 1999 and now has over 4 million customers in the UK.

MVNO Services;

• MVNOs typically do not have their own infrastructure, but some leading MVNO's deploy their own mobile IN infrastructure in order to facilitate the means to offer value-added services. MNVO's can treat incumbent infrastructure such as radio equipment as a commodity, while the MVNO offers its own advanced and differentiated services based on exploitation of their own intelligent network infrastructure.

 

• In this way, each MVNO and the network operator could focus on their own niche markets and form customized detailed services that would expand their customer reach and brand.

 

• Most of the MVNOs come in the market to target only pre-paid customers and provide them only pre-paid services like voice, SMS, MMS, data, broadband, etc., with some nice value-added services.

MVNO Billing;

• Assuming an incumbent operator sells their infrastructure to an MVNO, there could be different business models and agreements between incumbent and MVNO. Following are the most commonly used;

  • MVNO can brand their services and sell them in the market and MVNE will help in providing those services to the end customer. Here, a fixed percent of commission will go to the MVNE.

  • MVNO can buy products and services in bulk at special discounted prices and then brand them with their name and sell in the market.

  • MVNO sells the products and services, and based on the usage generated by the end customers, MVNO pays an amount to the MVNE.

 

• In all the cases, MVNO may be required to pay some amount of security deposit to the MVNE and then monthly settlement happens using simple reports generated by the MVNE.

 

• An MVNE can add an MVNO in their billing system as a corporate customer(Reseller, Dealer, Agent etc.) as long as MVNO is providing post-paid services and can add all the products and services provided to MVNO. By the end of every month or usually after every two weeks, invoice can be generated and collection can be followed up.

 

• But usually, most of the MVNOs provide pre-paid services, which are handled in Pre-Paid system. In such case, MVNO functionality is achieved either using built-in functionality in the pre-paid system or by simply defining a separate service class. All the usage CDRs and other information is dumped into data warehouse from where reports can be generated to prepare invoice.