Allowances and Variable Consumption Rates

A provider may require flexible allowance units, for example for international call minutes to consume minute allowances at a faster rate than domestic call minutes. This allows providers to bring simplified offers to the market, reducing the number of minute offers while reflecting the underlying wholesale price. It allows customers to purchase minutes without needing to understand how they will be used in advance.

When CMP Converged Monetisation Platform. The MDS Global product that supports customer care and billing for digital service providers. is being used in conjunction with NetEngage as an Online Charging System (OCS), the OCS supports the use of flexible units to represent an allowance such as data or voice for example. An allowance of flexible units allows different rates on unit consumption to be defined on the OCS for different call types. For example, a domestic call may consume 10 units per minute, whereas an international call may consume 25 units per minute. A CMP adaptor allows a flexible units offer defined in the OCS to be linked to a voice or data allowance configured in CMP.

CMP can present these units in any way deemed suitable, such that 100 units can be represented as 100MB or 100 minutes for example. This means that a voice allowance with a unit definition on the OCS can consume seconds at different rates based on the type of call. The end user A person with the capability to log in to the CMP GUI software, such as a customer service advisor or agent. still sees their balance as voice minutes but the balance will be consumed faster for a 1 minute call to Europe than a 1 minute local call. A balance enquiry returning units from the OCS is rendered in AgentView The graphical user interface of the CMP that is typically used by Customer Service Agents to access CMP customer and billing data. In versions prior to CMP 8.0, this was called the CMP GUI. based on the type of allowance – data or voice. CDRs show both the charged and actual consumption of the service on the OCS, for example charged 10 minutes against the balance, when actual duration was 5 minutes. The Openet CDR provides both the actual usage The consumption of services, for example a subscriber using call minutes. and the billed usage of the call or session.