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Telecom Billing - Pre-Paid vs Post-Paid

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Most of the operators provide two options to their customer to go for a postpaid or a prepaid connection. A postpaid as well as a prepaid connection has its advantages and disadvantages.

Usually any operator will have 70%-80% customer base comprising of pre-paid customers and rest of the customer base will come from post-paid side. For an operator it is always good to have more post-paid customers.

You might be willing to know about the differences between the two types of customers, services and systems. Let me list down few major differences between the two:

Post-paid Scenario:

Network elements (like switches, SMSC) produce raw usage called Usage Detail Records (UDRs) or Call Detail Records (CDRs) which contain information required by the billing system:

The above raw UDRs from network elements and also from other service providers are received by the billing system and the billing system converts these into a format understandable by the system. The above formatted / converted UDR is then guided to find the customer/account to which the call should be charged and then rate the event accordingly.

The above rated UDRs then stored in the billing data store. And on the billing cycle date, the billing process picks up these rated UDRs and processes these and renders bill/invoice, taking into account, the payments, taxes, discounts etc.

The customer then pays the bill and the billing system is updated with the payment details. Following is the diagram showing the above standard billing process:

Post-paid Billing System

Pre-paid Scenario:

Steps involved in prepaid billing in brief are as follows:

Following figure shows the general prepaid billing scenario:

Pre-paid Billing System

Prepaid billing process involves following important steps along with account information gathering and updating account after the call is completed.


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