service changes triggered via the subscriber portal to be processed without the OSS’s intervention.  HSI service upgrade from Silver to Gold is an example of a service that a policy manager can automatically provision from a portal request.

Billing for next generation services

In order to complement the flexible service delivery supported by the provisioning and policy managers, billing systems must be brought into the dynamic loop to reflect the flexible service plans and content billing that can now be offered to subscribers.   In addition to automatic service modification notification, the Alcatel 5750 SSC policy manager closes the gap by offering a metering and accounting framework that is fully integrated with policy management and multi-vendor DPI functionality to offer both service-based billing and application-based billing.

Service-based billing refers to the billing of a service category, such as HSI, according to the amount of traffic generated by the subscriber on that particular service queue.  Service access point or application queue statistics are collected at predefined regular intervals by the policy manager and aggregated records exposed to billing systems for reconciliation with prepaid, post-paid or monthly statement roll-up.  In addition, by only collecting usage statistics on the queue carrying off-net applications, the policy manager provides the mechanism to avoid double billing subscribers for usage of on-net applications.