Purpose
PortaBilling with Oracle Real Application Cluster is a carrier-grade converged billing/provisioning system for communication service providers. It communicates with elements of your network (such as VoIP switches, IP TV streaming servers, or messaging gateways), provides these nodes with authentication or authorization (determining whether a customer should be admitted and provided with a service), and gathers billing events (i.e. data about services rendered to your customers). Based on this information, it performs rating for services, creates transaction records (also called xDRs – eXtensible Detail Records1 ), and modifies customers’ balances accordingly.
All this happens in real time, so that billing data is updated as soon as a session is completed (e.g., the customer hangs up his phone, or an SMS message is sent). PortaBilling with Oracle Real Application Cluster provides a unified platform for multiple services, which allows you to use it to charge clients for their voice calls, text messages, and data transfers, thus effectively deploying triple-play on your network.
PortaBilling with Oracle Real Application Cluster acts as the nerve center of your network. After you enter information about your services, rates, customers, and so on via the web interface, PortaBilling with Oracle Real Application Cluster communicates in real time with elements of your network to supply information regarding which customers service should be provided to (and which not), as well as exactly how it should be provided. Customers whose balance has run out will be disconnected immediately after exceeding the maximum session duration and (because billing happens in real time) funds will be withdrawn from their account and service denied if they make another attempt to use the service.
1For xDRs for telephony services, the previous term CDRs (Call Details Records) is often used.
