:Telecom Billing

System:
Sending voice, data, picture, fax, etc., from one point to another using electronics media is
termed as telecommunication, and in short, it terms as telecom. Examples include
Phone, Radio, Television and Internet. The medium of transmission includes Wire (Copper),
Fiber Optics, Ether (wireless), Radio towers , Microwave, Satellite, etc.
Today, everybody is using phones (Mobile & Land Line) and same time numerous services
provided by telecom operators. To name, following are few international phone companies:

 Nokia

 Samsung

 Panasonic

 Blackberry

 Motorola

Let me list down few international telecom operators, who are providing satisfactory telecom
services to their customers:

 Verizon

 Vodafone

 Airtel

 TATA

 Etisalat

 Qtel

Let me also list down few basic telecom services being provided by various well known telecom
operators:

 Voice Call

 Fax Service

 SMS & MMS

 Internet Connection
 Data Download and Upload

 Video Conferencing

 IP based services, i.e., voice over IP or VPN

Telecom operators are charging their customers in various ways, but there are two mainly used
parameters to charge a customer:

 Rental Charges: These are the charges taken from the customers on monthly basis against a
service provided. For example, your telephone monthly charges would be $5.00 regardless you
use it or not.
 Usage Charges: These are the charges taken from the customers based on the service
utilization. For example, you would be charged for all the calls made or data downloaded using
your phone.

Apart from monthly rental and usage charges, operators may charge you for service initiation,
installation, service suspension or termination as well.

Q: What is a Telecom Billing ?

Ans: Telecom Billing is a process of collecting usage, aggregating it, applying required usage and
rental charges and finally generating invoices for the customers. Telecom Billing process also
includes receiving and recording payments from the customers.

Billing Systems:
There could be very complex charging scenarios, which would be difficult to handle manually.
There are state-of-the-art Billing Systems available in software market which handle billing
tasks very efficiently and provide lots of flexibilities to service providers to offer their services
with different price structures.

Billing systems are often viewed as accounts receivable as the billing system assists in the
collection (receipt) of money from customers. Billing systems are also part of accounts payable
(for inter-carrier settlements) as customers often use services from other companies such as
wireless roaming, long distance, and call completion through other networks.

Billing systems are high-end, reliable and expansive softwares, which provide various
functionalities. Here is a list of most important features but not limited to the following:

 Rating & billing: This involves rating the products or services usage and producing monthly
bills.
 Payment processing: This involves posting of the customer payments to customer's account.
 Credit control and collections: This involves chasing the outstanding payments and taking
appropriate actions to get the payments.
 Disputes and adjustments: This involves, recording any customer disputes against their bills
and creating adjustments to refund the disputed amount in order to settle the disputes.
 Pre-pay and post pay services: This involves supporting both pre-paid and post-paid
customer base.
 Multilingual & multiple currencies: Multilingual and multiple currencies support is
required if the business is spread across the globe and have multinational customers or if the
government regulations demand for it.
 Inter-carrier settlements: This involves sharing of revenue between carriers that provide
services to each other's customers.
 Products & services: This involves providing flexible way to maintain various products and
services, and sell them individually or in packages.
 Discount applications:This involves defining various discount schemes in order to reduce
customer churn and attract and increase customer base.

Billing Types:
When you drill down billing subject, it becomes more complicated. I would try to cover most of
the concepts later in this tutorial but let us have a broad view of widely used billing types:

 Pre-pay Billing: A billing mechanism where customer pays in advance and after that starts
using a service. Usually, prepaid customers do not receive any invoice and they are charged in
real time by the highly available billing systems called IN (Intelligent Network).
 Post-pay Billing: This is the conventional billing, which is coming for many years. Here,
customers buy products and services and use them throughout the month, and by end of the
month, invoices are generated by the service provider and sent those invoices to the customers
to make their due payment.
 Interconnect Billing: The network operator is usually financially responsible for services
provided to its customers by other networks regardless of whether or not the customer pays for
the service. Interconnect billing is related to inter-carrier or sometimes called partner
settlements.
 Roaming Charging: When a customer goes from one network operator's coverage area to
another operator's coverage area, first operator would pay marginal charges to second operator
to provide services to their customers. Such type of charges are settled through roaming billing.
This settlement is done as per TAP3 protocol, which I will discuss in upcoming chapters.
 Convergent Billing: Convergent billing is the integration of all service charges onto a single
customer invoice. Convergent billing means creating a unified view of the customer and all
services (Mobile, Fixed, IP, etc.) provided to that customer.
 Telecom Billing - System
Architecture
Following diagram shows a typical architecture of a Billing System. Here, we have two
possibilities:

 CRM (Customer Relationship Management)/OMOF (Order Management and Order Fulfilment)

system contacts with the billing system and billing system contacts with provisioning system to
provision the services and network inventory system as well to assign phone numbers or IP
addresses, etc.
 Second possibility could be that CRM/OMOF system itself contacts with provisioning system to
provision the services and network inventory system as well to assign phone numbers or IP
addresses, etc.
 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 non-usage 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 contribute 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:

A billing system should be composed of a series of independent applications that, when run
together, are referred to as the billing system. A good billing system should provide the following
major functionalities with a depth of flexibility:

 Customer-interface Management: The billing system must be able to handle customer-

initiated contact, oversee outbound customer contact, and manage the contact life cycle.
 Order Management: It is a basic functionality, which should be available in a typical billing
system. Billing system should be capable enough to capture product & service order and manage
the order-entry life cycle, and oversee the order-completion life cycle.
 Sales and Marketing: A satisfactory billing system should answer customer query, handle
commissions, provide sales support, track prospects, manage campaigns, analyze product
performance, and acquire multiple dwelling units.
 Rate Plans and Rating: Billing systems must manage a variety of products and services,
different rate plans associated with those products and services and should provide flexible ways
to rate usage generated by those products and services.
 Discounting: System should be capable of giving various types of discounts on different usages
and rentals.
 Invoicing: It is important that the system perform billing inquiry, generate bills, process
deposits, perform account administration, maintain tax and fee information, process financial
information.
 Credit Control & Collection: Billing system should control usage and revenue by assigning
different credit classes to different customers. System should support payment collection and
applying them on different invoices.
 Multilingual Support: Multilingual support involves providing invoices and customer care
services in multiple languages.
 Multiple Currencies: Multiple currencies used in different countries can complicate the
billing system as the billing and customer care system must be capable of recording and
processing in units of multiple currencies.
 Partner revenue management: Partner revenue management are the sharing of revenue
between carriers that provide services to each other's customers.
 Problem Handling: Billing systems should also be able to manage trouble-ticket entry,
coordinate trouble-ticket closure, and track the resolution progress of a trouble ticket.
 Performance Reporting: A satisfactory system will provide performance reporting, ensure
quality-of-service (QoS) reporting, create management reports, and generate regulatory reports.
 Installation and Maintenance: The system should also provide workforce scheduling and
manage activities performed at the customer premises.
 Auditing & Security: A billing system should perform data audits and integrity checks. A
secure system is always desirable for any operator.

CRM/OMOF SYSTEM:-
This is the first system from where a customer order is captured and customer is created into the
system. CRM stand for Customer Relationship Management and OMOF stands for Order
Management and Order Fulfillment.
There are systems like Siebel, which provides modules for CRM as well as OMOF. The CRM
system keeps customer-related information along with product and services. The OMOF module
is responsible to track order starting from its creation till its completion.

Here, we have two possibilities:

 CRM (Customer Relationship Management)/OMOF (Order Management and Order

Fulfillment) system contacts with the billing system and billing system contacts with
provisioning system to provision the services and network inventory system as well to assign
phone numbers or IP addresses, etc.
 Second possibility could be that CRM/OMOF system itself contacts with provisioning system to
provision the services and network inventory system as well to assign phone numbers or IP
addresses, etc.

Provisioning System:
This system takes commands either from the Billing System or CRM/OMOF System to activate,
deactivate and suspend the services. Both the architectures are valid and depend on how
architect designs the whole setup.

After taking provisioning commands, this system contacts with core network system to activate,
deactivate or suspend the services. After a successful provisioning, this system sends a response
back to either the Billing System or the CRM system depending on who sent it the last
command.
Network Inventory System (NIS):
This system maintains all the network identifiers like phone numbers, MSISDN, IP addresses, e-
mail addresses, etc., and technically it is called Network Inventory System.

Depending on the system architecture, either CRM/OMOF or Billing System contacts NIS to
obtain a required network identifier and assigns it to the customer at the time of order creation.

This system is responsible to maintain the life cycle of network identifiers which starts with
available and then flows through different stages like activation, suspend, terminate, quarantine,
and again available.

Network Switches:
Generally, Billing System does not interact with network switches. Network switches are
responsible to provide all the services to the end customers based on what services have been
provisioned for the customer. These systems are responsible for controlling calls, data
download, SMS transfer, etc., and finally generating Call Detail Records.

Network Switches include MSC, SMSC, GGSN and MMSC. For more information on GSM, MSC,
SMS, SMSC, GGSN, MMS, MMSC, please refer to our GSM tutorials.
Mediation System:
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
downstream system, which is usually a Billing System. The Mediation System applies various
rules on CDRs to process them; for example, mediation system marks the international calls
based on the dialednumber (B-Number), same way mediation system marks the on-net calls
based on A-Number and B-Number.
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 type of calls will be at Mediation System level. Same
way, 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.

Data Ware House (DWH) System:

This is a downstream system for the Billing System and usually keeps tons of historical data
related to the customers. Billing System dumps various customer information into the DWH
system. This information includes service usage, invoices, payments, discounts and adjustments,
etc.

All this information is used to generate various types of management reports and for business
intelligence and forecast.
DWH system is always meant to work on bulk and huge data, and if there is a need for any small
report, then it is always worth to generate it from the billing system directly instead of abusing
DWH for a small task.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP):

An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system provides modules to handle Financials, Human
Resources and Supply Chain Management, etc.

Billing System interface with this system is used to post all the financial transactions like
invoices, payments, adjustments.

This system works like a general ledger for the finance department and gives complete revenue
information at any point in time it is required.

Payment Gateway:
As such, this is not necessarily a complete system, but it could be a kind of custom component,
which sits in between the Billing System and different payment channels like banks, credit card
gateway, shops and retailers, etc.

All the payment channels use payment gateway to post payments to the billing system to settle
down customer invoices.

Usually, Payment gateway exposes a kind of API (Application Programming Interface) to the
outside world to post the payments to the Billing System. The API can be used by any external
resource to post the payment.