| Billing / Concepts | |
A byproduct of Preseem’s bandwidth management is the capture of bandwidth (bytes transferred) usage by an ISP’s end customer. This usage is made available to billing applications via an Application Programmer Interface (API).
Using this API, BillMax can be configured to receive and process bandwidth usage in near real time. This processing includes a number of actions or abilities, each of which is optional. These actions include:
Here is an outline of the process flow:
Poll Preseem periodically (every X minutes) for usage data for a specified time period. A typical scenario is to poll every 15 minutes for the preceding 15 minute time interval (for example at 10:30 retrieve usage for the time period 10:00 till 10:15).
Data returned includes the BillMax service number and bytes downloaded and uploaded. Data returned is reformatted as Radius accounting detail dataset and then loaded into BillMax via the radparse program.
For each service, a record is written to the datacall table provided that service exists in BillMax. If the service is associated with a usage billing plan (see Tier plans) then notifications and suspension (if applicable) takes place.
If a usage billing plan is used, BillMax will bill usage where applicable each billing period.
To implement, first check with Preseem support to ensure this feature is available in your Preseem instance. If available, they will provide a API key to be used when making the necessary API calls.