6 Billing integration (PUSH method)

An integration of DPI platform with a billing system is arranged by PUSH model. It means that the billing (or an additional system) has to inform DPI by itself about available services for each subscriber and policing configuration.

This information is transferred by respective commands1) Sending of this information via additional attributes of Radius server will be released. . One can send commands either based on events (advised) or all at once (for example, scheduled uploading, if billing does not support even based operation). Some integration models are described here "Quick start".

For example: specification of the billing plan (policing configuration) for 30,000 subscribers at once takes less than one second:

time fdpi_ctrl load --policing rate_10M.cfg --file subsribers.lst Result processing file 'subsribers.lst' : 30000/30000/0/0/0 real 0m0.344s user 0m0.009s sys 0m0.144s

The netflow 5 support by billing is required to handle restricted billing plans or those with traffic based billing. In order to reduce the load on billing software, DPI can group data by subscribers before sending and skip the information on those subscribers that do not need it. An address of billing's collector has to be configured in DPI in order to send the data to this collector. It is described here statistics collection options. And the service with code 9 must be enabled for subscribers that require such information.

The modern billing in connection with DPI allows to offer services like: turbo button by time or by traffic, to support plans with torrent traffic limitation, plans with further speed reduction, to support plans with speed variation depending on time or available channel capacity and so on.