• Over 100 call attempts/second, translating to over 10 million minutes per month
• RADIUS server, billing engine, database, IVR support - all in one solution
• Support unlimited number of VoIP gateways
• Session Initiation Protocol support - integrated with PortaSIP
• Advanced least cost routing
• Unlimited number of products and tariffs for single network
• Multilingual web-based interface for administrators, customers, customer-care staff and account owners
• Template system for safe and easy bulk-access to the database (e.g. automated tariff upload)
• Customizable invoices and receipts
• E-commerce modules for augmenting accounts with credit cards
• Customer care section for easy troubleshooting of customer complaints
• ASP-ready - several independent billing systems on one PortaBilling100 billing engine
• Superior diagnostic and helpdesk tools
• Statistics module for generation of customized reports and graphs
• Integration-ready thanks to the product’s open architecture

For more technical and/or pricing information about PortaBilling100 please contact our sales team.

Features and Benefits

• Real-time billing
• Flexible rating
• Multiple business models
• Prepaid and postpaid service
• Products and account management
• Web-based customer care and self-provisioning
• Virtual private networks for corporate accounts
• Reports and invoices
• Partnerships
• Scalability, reliability and high availability
• Operation support systems and fraud detection
• Statistics and monitoring

PortaOne billing and customer care is the solution of choice for small and medium-sized ISPs and voice operators. PortaBilling is a carrier-grade, real-time billing and customer care system that provides a scalable, highly-reliable solution. PortaBilling allows IP telephony service providers to offer flexible pricing plans that support their marketing strategies. PortaBilling is ready to install and integrate with hardware from leading VoIP equipment manufacturers like Cisco and Quintum.

Real-time Billing

• Accounting and rating performed in real time
• Easy service management and operation
• Up-to-the-minute account status
• Integrated pre/postpaid billing with xDR/CDR generation and flexible billing increments
• Low water mark warnings

Flexible Rating

• Unlimited number of rating plans supported
• Prepaid and postpaid services
• Flexible call costing by day of week and time of day
• Various charge types:
  • Setup (one-time) charges
  • Maintenance charges at pre-defined periods (weekly, monthly, etc.)
  • Usage-based rates
• Stepped or tiered dropping rates per call or per total usage
• Promotion packages and special rates, such as reduced rates for first period of service activity

Multiple Business Models

In today’s world of IP communication, service providers must do business with multiple resellers, agents, and other service providers. These collaborations result in a wide variety of business models, creating a need for advanced revenue-sharing schemes. PortaBilling supports origination and termination partner agreements, ensuring revenue for service providers via sophisticated partner management and settlement mechanisms.

With PortaBilling, providers have the flexibility to define their own business models, as well as offer a billing and customer care solution for multiple Virtual Service Providers (VSPs) within a single billing system. With service providers aiming to utilize all available resources in order to maximize revenues, PortaBilling supports their efforts by providing a billing solution for both retail and wholesale business models.

Prepaid and Postpaid Service

PortaBilling supports all customer types:

• credit
• limited credit
• prepaid calling cards
• prepaid customers
• rechargeable accounts

PortaBilling makes it easy to offer prepaid calling card services. Service providers can easily create calling-card batches by using our Card Generation tool. For prepaid calling cards, PortaBilling provides full debit services, including disposable and rechargeable cards. PortaBilling provides a real-time payment database for tracking and viewing payments entered into the system. This allows prepaid customers to start using the service immediately after paying for it

Prepaid customers receive service precisely for the prepaid amount; the system keeps track of the customer account balance, deducting from it according to service usage. When the balance bottoms out, service is disabled and the customer must then recharge the account. Credit and limited-credit customers are invoiced periodically, with each invoice reflecting all charges since the last invoice. Credit customers have no limit on their service charges, while limited credit customers are restricted to a predefined credit amount. During service use the customer balance is checked, and once the customer account reaches the credit limit, the account is disabled in real time.

Products and Account Management

PortaBilling provides the flexibility needed to define tariffs for new products, enabling deployment of market-driven services instantly. PortaBilling’s open and flexible service environment and its straightforward interface allow services to be added, modified or enhanced on the spot, with no service disruption or additional development necessary. Alternative solutions simply cannot compete in terms of the flexibility provided by PortaBilling.

Using PortaBilling, service providers can quickly bring new products and promotional packages to market, as well as smoothly modify existing ones. PortaBilling also offers the ability to bundle services effortlessly, with the ability to flexibly define mandatory and optional services within service bundles.

Web-Based Customer Care and Self-Provisioning

PortaBilling provides Web-based tools to analyze and respond to customer behavior and activity in real time. Web interfaces providing up-to-the-minute account information are available for both subscribers and customer service representatives. Customer self-care reduces operational costs, while giving subscribers the personalized online service they demand - at any time and from anywhere.

Service providers with remote operation centers can provide full customer service capabilities locally with PortaBilling Web applications. Customer service representatives can create, search for and modify accounts, and view customer activity and balances. The resulting service quality builds customer loyalty and increases traffic volume.

Virtual Private Networks for Corporate Accounts

PortaBilling offers a flexible approach to account hierarchy rating and billing to accommodate complex organizational and business models. PortaBilling supports unlimited levels of accounts within a business hierarchy, and allows service providers to offer special flexible deals to enterprise customers. For example, service providers can assign different products and tariffs to different accounts, even within the same organization. Given that a mobile sales force has very different telephony needs than an accounting department, these features are a major selling point with large corporate accounts.

Today, VPN represents an essential service for enterprise customers, and opens a new market for service providers. This value-added service is highly appealing to large enterprises in that it enables them to control and reduce the total telecom costs of intra-enterprise calls. Voice VPN support ensures that calls within the enterprise’s VPN have a higher level of quality and are rated differently. PortaBilling enables providers to distinguish between enterprise subscribers’ on-net to on-net, on-net to off-net, off-net to on-net, and off-net to off-net calls. The VoIP VPN service also allows special treatment for extension numbers, which is a common practice within enterprises.

Reports and Invoices

PortaBilling generates a variety of reports highlighting vital information needed by providers, in a format that is easily imported into any database or invoicing system.

With PortaBilling, service providers pre-define the billing cycles (weekly, monthly, etc.) for each billable account and automate the process of generating reports. The system offers built-in xDR/CDR reports on account usage. And, of course, the PortaOne service team can build a customized reporting system for the service provider on request.

Partnerships

PortaBilling was designed for fast, straightforward integration with leading equipment vendors’ hardware. PortaBilling is ready to install and integrate with network elements (gateways and gatekeepers) from major vendors like Cisco and Quintum. PortaBilling also supports multiple vendor systems, providing customers with the flexibility to scale up their systems to meet rising traffic volumes. Also, the system’s open architecture is designed to interface with external applications such as legacy, CRM and ERP systems.

Scalability, Reliability and High Availability

The PortaOne billing and customer care solution gives service providers the ability to expand their service offerings and subscriber base, without the need to redesign or replace their existing billing and customer care software. PortaBilling has been designed to adapt seamlessly to the evolution of network infrastructure. With PortaBilling, service providers can work with multiple equipment vendors and add more servers with no downtime.

This carrier-grade solution has proven itself time and again, supporting millions of subscribers and countless simultaneous transactions and reacting instantly while customers are online. In order to accommodate millions of customer accounts, PortaOne offers a multi-server solution that separates the billing system from the accounts database. This architecture can handle hundreds of events per second, such as customer authentication and cost calculations. PortaBilling uses the MySQL database server, the world’s most widely-used open-source database. Upon request, the PortaOne service team can rapidly deploy a solution for porting to other vendors’ databases.

Operation Support Systems

PortaBilling100 is a comprehensive solution that includes call management and traffic analysis support systems for load monitoring and customer behavior analysis thereby maximizing utilization of network resources. Real-time customer notifications allow providing an automated feedback to a customer and thus decrease workload on the helpdesk.

PortaBilling100 fraud detection component is closely linked to the traffic analysis. It activates various alarms whenever the user-defined parameters defined by the operator are violated. This feature ensures that the service providers will not lose revenue due to a fraudulent use of their network.

Alerts go off when PortaBilling100 detects:

• Unusual network traffic patterns
• Misconfiguration on one of the network nodes
• Billing misconfiguration (missing rates, etc.)
• Account misuse or situations when an account spending is over available funds due to the lack of proper authorization

In addition, PortaBilling100 may provide your customers with a special notifications when:

• Customer’s balance is over a certain threshold
• A payment is posted to the customer’s account
• Customer’s invoice is due in a specific number of days
• Customer’s invoice is overdue and its account is about to be suspended

Statistics and Monitoring

The PortaBilling Statistics Module is an effective, analytical marketing tool. This module produces sophisticated reports and graphic analyses of call activity. A clear indication of customer usage behavior is supplied by data indicating peak hours, top customers and excessive telephone use. Data on average call duration and the number of abandoned calls provide a means of measuring quality of service, while market segment penetration is reflected in information on top destinations and customer groups. A call volume analysis can also be made, based on information indicating the total number of calls per gateway and line.

Monitoring reports are essential to providers and enterprises as a basis for deciding on the optimum allocation of resources and efficient revenue-saving measures. The PortaBilling monitoring module (RRD Based) generates reports showing call loads to different destinations, call volumes at different hours of the day, and numbers of calls per minute for a specific gateway or group of gateways, as well as providing a means of evaluating maximum network capacity. Traffic data is summarized in peak, average and daily traffic reports, which may be displayed and printed in various graphic formats.