Johannesburg, 19 Apr 2013
One of the most well-known advantages of switching to voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) services is that it is more cost-effective and convenient than more traditional telephony. However, the costs are not always stipulated and set out clearly by service providers and are therefore not always well understood by their clients, which can lead to a lot of unnecessary confusion and subsequent frustration.
To prevent any misunderstanding that can lead to such customer dissatisfaction, and to continue offering its clients the best possible service, Skywire Technologies recently launched PortaOne's PortaBilling VOIP billing software platform. By becoming one of just merely a handful of companies to offer this service locally, the independent telecommunications service provider is continuing on its path of being an innovative force in the national telecoms sphere.
PortaBilling, by global communications infrastructure vendor PortaOne, is a carrier-grade, converged billing, service provisioning and customer management platform for telecommunications service providers, Internet telephony service providers (ITSPs), mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) and wholesale carriers. The comprehensive product enables VOIP carriers and ISPs such as Skywire to implement, manage and deliver a wide variety of business models quickly and flexibly.
This system communicates with elements of the network - such as VOIP gateways or WiFi/DSL access points - and provides these nodes with authentication and authorisation. "This billing engine is beneficial to both Skywire and our clients," says Mondi Hattingh, co-director of Skywire Technologies. "To ensure that clients know exactly what they are paying for, PortaBilling gathers billing events, such as data about the services rendered to our customers, and creates detailed transaction and real-time billing records, modifies the customer's balance, and performs ratings for the services. The authentication and authorisation features also help Skywire to identify a subscriber by phone number, PIN, IP, etc, and to thereby determine whether a customer should be admitted to use or be provided with a specific type of service, for example, voice calls or wireless Internet access."
Since the billing data is updated in real time, it kicks in as soon as a session is completed and shows the exact duration of a telephone call, ending when the customer hangs up his/her phone, or an SMS message has been sent. PortaBilling can act as a network's nerve centre. "After you have entered information about your services, rates, customers and so on via the Web interface, PortaBilling will communicate in real time with elements of your network to supply information regarding which customers the service should be supplied to (and which not), as well as exactly how it should be provided," says Hattingh.
PortaBilling also provides a unified platform for multiple services, which will allow Skywire to effectively deploy triple play (IP voice calls, data transfer and video) on its network. In addition to offering these benefits to end-users, Skywire provides a PortaOne Partition that resellers can rent from the company. This allows resellers to brand the PortaOne solution as their own and on-sell the services if they are registered service providers with Skywire. "Our PortaOne is located in Teraco, which is a vendor-neutral data centre, and is one of the ways we provide our clients with an encompassing, all-in-one service," Hattingh adds. "We know the challenges that are faced by our end-user clients as well as our resellers, and PortaOne is a secure, comprehensive solution to their billing and management issues."
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