Billing the Prepaid Services for Web Content Providers
A Telecom Prepaid Scenario is quite well established. There are many players with their scalable COTS products and solutions which cater to Telecom Prepaid Services. If we look into the various applications in this prepaid-billing area, there are the network switches, Service Control Points, Radius/Diameter Protocol governers and the billing systems performing Authentication, Accounting, Balance Management and Call Management.
For service providers managing content online, particularly in web services industry, prepaid services are not completely explored yet.
There can be many different attractive options to be rolled out to the end customers if Web Services industry embraces the Prepaid services heavily. A quick scenario that comes to my mind is the Advertisements that are put up in websites and number of clicks being counted. Advertiser can buy a $50 pack for 5000 Clicks. Every click on the Banner will reduce the balance on his account and the advertisement would cease to show up when the balance becomes 0. A prepaid billing system is best suited to handle such real time requirements. But, how is it going to be connected to the webservers? Who would act as an SCP in this scenario? Some products have built in diameter managers which can be used for meeting certain requirements. Do you know of other best practices for this purpose?
From the CAPEX/OPEX perspective, I presume, it takes a few more years for these prepaid COTS packages to evolve, become less-complex and more suitable for the web content scenario. Since this part of industry cannot be compared straight away to Telecom in annual revenue turnover, it is important that the COTS packages to bridge the gap by becoming more flexible and requirement friendly for this industry.
