Time based billing

[regs at kinetix.gr]

These situations are often in the VoIP billing world. If the rate 
changes during a call there is little
you can do in a prepaid billing system (in a postpaid situation this is 
not a problem). You have to choose
either to bill your customer with the rate that is valid at the 
beginning of the call or at the end of it. Most of the
implemantations choose to bill the customer with the rate that is valid 
at the end of the call. I know
this is somewhat inconsistent because if you calculate the remaining 
time with a low rate and the rate changes
during the call then you might end up with a negative credit on your 
prepaid customer's balance. There is little
you can do to about that. You just have to choose one of the options 
above and notify your customers
about your decision. The thing is that all this - although scary at 
first sight - is somewhat balanced in the end
(fair-wise) because the probabilities that your customer can make a call 
during a low-to-high rate change are
equal with the probabilities that the call follows a high-to-low rate 
change. So in the end nobody really loses or wins.

You don't have to be a perl expert to use the rlm_perl module. But I can 
tell you from my experience that it
gives you control of all different scenarios that may arise. Your 
back-end could (usually a DB in these situations)
be as complex as you like (pricelists per customer, per time-slice, per 
type, per u-name-it), and your code could
be as complex as you like (and as dynamic as you like) using a 3rd 
generation language that gives the flexibility to
do whatever you want.


Alan DeKok wrote:
> Saeed Akhtar wrote:
>   
>> Yes I know that freeradius doesn't know whether we are charging $ 1 or
>> 2. But the purpose of asking question was that If a user has 3 hrs left
>> @ $1/hr and after an hour the rate changes to 0.5/hr then technically
>> freeradius should reply Session-Timeout = 5hrs as (1hr @ $1/hr + 4hrs @
>> $0.5/hr). So may be we can create some condition to do so. 
>>     
>
>   See the "expr" module.  It has limited support for some math expressions.
>
>   Alan DeKok.
> -
> List info/subscribe/unsubscribe? See http://www.freeradius.org/list/users.html
>   

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.freeradius.org/pipermail/freeradius-users/attachments/20081203/0812677e/attachment.html>