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Real-Time Billing

Heavily used by telecommunication companies (telcos), real-time billing systems enable enriched, custom offerings based on a customer’s changing data.

Call Detail Record (CDR) systems have been around for years. But they’ve morphed rapidly to engage all aspects of a consumer’s holistic, digital life, such as interacting with family and friends, streaming video, and using smartphone apps. As mobile telecom companies have shifted to providing billing based on data usage, CDR systems have been supplanted by service-based routing and smart-routing equipment. No longer is it sufficient for a CDR system to capture only the number of minutes a user has spent on a particular activity and multiply it by a set rate to compute the user’s total charge. Today, telcos offer a myriad of complex and ever-changing pricing plans based on consumer usage and plan data such as whether it is a family or international plan and how much data is typically used. At the same time, providers must interact with users to monitor usage, provide overage alerts, and offer the option to buy additional services.

Today’s modern, real-time billing systems capture huge volumes of inbound data and use rule engines to review a client’s dynamic profile and proactively engage them. This greatly improves the customer experience, enhancing retention rates and ultimately bettering the provider-user relationship.

Database business requirements for real-time billing:

  • Real-time decisioning on large, continuously updated datasets
  • Scale to handle increasing number of transactions as additional services consumed
  • Consistent availability, often 24x7x365
  • Integration with business intelligence systems that provide actionable information

Aerospike is a good choice for real-time billing because it provides

  • Predictable, high performance against large transaction volumes
  • Industry-leading availability and uptime (five 9s)
  • Scale with low latency to handle increasing loads
  • Significantly lower TCO