Rating is process to calculate subscriber’s usage charges (Voice/SMS/Other services) as per subscriber’s rate plan and finally loaded into DB for further prospects. The rated CDR further sent to credit monitoring. When the credit amount on the customer’s balance has reached a certain limit, some predefined actions such as granting a discount or sending SMS alert to customer carried out. Rated CDR also further used to analysis of fraud in terms of high usage.
Rating of calls made on below parameters.
A: Time of call (off peak/on peak)
B: Usages volume (call duration/amount of data usage/ number of SMS sent/).
C: Destination (National/ International/Roaming)
D: Premium charges (third party charges).
There are various billing solution vendors available and they have their own rating chain for rating customer’s usage.
Generally we have two data bases :1-> Customer Data base: This stores the information about customer name/address,customer code, rate plan information, services activated ( primary /secondary) ,customer status ( Active/suspended/deactivated) ,IMSI and SIM information etc.
2: A CDR Database : This stores customers call records .like information about Calling party, called party ,IMEI,IMSI,Callduration, callstart time,call end time, swtich/trunk group used, Call type( MOC,MTC,Roaming,Transit…etc..).
The rating chain fetches customer’s information and rate plan applied on it from Customer DB and rate their usage in respect to usage made reflecting on CDR DB.
Rate Plan configuration Basic:
configuring rate plans includes configuration of rates, services , time zone etc. various billing operator provide different rating package configuration structure. In general we have to gone through below mentioned steps to setup rate plans:
