Telecommunications – Radiotelephone system – Usage measurement
Reexamination Certificate
1997-06-27
2003-06-10
Cumming, William (Department: 2684)
Telecommunications
Radiotelephone system
Usage measurement
C455S418000, C379S112010
Reexamination Certificate
active
06577858
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to communication apparatus, and more particularly to communications apparatus for supplying and acquiring products and services from one or more suppliers of communications services or services offered over communications channels.
The invention is chiefly, but not exclusively, concerned with the supply of telecommunication services to a customer from one or more telecommunications suppliers.
2. Related Art
More particularly, the present invention is primarily concerned with the communication or billing or charging information. At present, different suppliers of telecommunications services charge on different bases. Suppliers of data network services (e.g. local area networks) often charge on a fixed rate basis, without taking any account of the amount of usage at the network. This makes accounting extremely simple. On the other hand, telecommunication companies have historically charged for network usage, and have evolved fairly complicated charging strategies which differentiate between local and national calls, calls at different times of day, and so on.
In many existing networks, communications bandwidth is a scarce resource, and hence such pricing strategies tend to reflect this by pricing at a higher rate services for which there is greater demand, so as to attempt to optimise the usage of the network. It is to be expected that there will continue to be a desire to make more efficient use of communications bandwidth in future. Our earlier international application number PCT/GB94/01128 (A24601), filed on May 24, 1994, published as WO94/28683, describes a telecommunications system in which customer terminal apparatus is arranged to negotiate “on the spot” prices with different telecommunications suppliers. In the system described in that application (which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety) there may be no “standard” tariffs; instead, each call (or other network service) may be priced individually.
Our earlier filed British patent application No. 94303092.4, filed on Apr. 28, 1994 (Agents reference A24847), and published as WO95/30317, discloses negotiation in an integrated telecommunications network, and is incorporated herein in its entirety by reference. Also disclosed therein is a visual user interface for service selection.
At present, the problem of charging communications users is a formidable technical challenge. Long gone are the days when it would have been possible to consider manual administration of accounts. Some of the issues involved are discussed in the British Telecommunications Engineering Journal, Volume 11, Part 4, January 1993 “Special issue on billing”. In that issue, some figures for the billing system operated by British Telecommunications plc are given as follows:
The system supports 23 million customers and produces 100 million bills a year. The bills itemise 15 million calls a day, and charge a revenue of £24 million per day. The billing system runs on 29 mainframe computers, and requires 1400 gigabytes of data on magnetic disks; 5 million lines of COBOL statements; 14 million screen exchanges every day; and 60 thousand connected terminals. At page 296 of that issue, it is disclosed that it is anticipated that 1.5 gigabytes of data need to be transferred through the network every night solely for the purpose of billing.
It will be apparent that the cost of billing is substantial. It has been estimated at over 10% of the revenue of many telecommunication companies, and much more than this in some cases. It seems likely that the cost and required complexity of billing systems will continue to increase in future, with the provision of ever wider ranges of telecommunications products and services and the proliferation of special rates and tariffs.
It is, of course, known (e.g. from GB 2001788) for user apparatus to log transactions, but since reconciliation is performed manually this merely increases the work to be performed by the user.
In EP-A-474 555 there is described multi-media communications apparatus, for example an ISDN terminal, which is configured to provide so-called “communications management reports” so that communications charges and communication history can be used for communications management. The reports are, in effect, enhanced ‘journals’ of the type produced by most fax machines: they may include the identity (number) of the party with whom communication was achieved, the type of service (video telephony, telephony, etc), the duration, time and date, and cost of the call can all be provided.
In EP-A-402302 there is described a credit card system designed to make the use of credit/debit cards cost effective even for very small value transactions. A vendor of low-cost products or services, such as newspapers, subway tickets, parking vouchers, has a terminal with a conventional credit card reader and an associated memory. When a user wants to use his credit card to buy a low-cost item, the card is read as usual, but a sum of money much greater than the cost of the item is “transferred” from the computer of the credit/debit card issuing authority. The amount of this sum of money is stored in the memory of the retailer and is associated in the memory with the number of its relevant card. The cost of the item purchased is deducted from that stored sum. The next time that customer wants to buy a subway ticket from that vendor, he/she uses the credit card. This time, rather than again having to make a call to the computer of the credit/debit card issuing authority, the cost of the item is simply deducted from the amount held in the relevant memory section of the vendor's terminal. Only when there is insufficient credit in that memory section to fund a desired payment does the terminal again contact the computer of the card issuing authority for a further, relatively large, transfer.
In EP-A-0341219 there is described an integrated automatic information and telephone point. This apparatus permits of the possibility of requested automatic information services being charged according to the criteria used for the charging of calls from telephone boxes.
In the paper “IC Card-Based Advanced Man-Machine Interface for Public Switched Telephone Network Service”, by Mizusawa et al, published in Electronics and Communications in Japan, Vol.73, 1990, No.1, Part 1, pages 36-54, there are described various applications of smart cards. In particular, the paper is concerned with personal numbering. Conventional PSTN service records are briefly discussed.
In EP-A-0325564 there is described a technique to permit a remote computer terminal to display images relevant to alphanumeric data passed to the computer over a low bit-rate link, without the usual problems associated with image transmission over low bit-rate links. This is achieved by storing relatively large image-elements in the computer's memory, which elements are then picked out and assembled in accordance with simple instructions transmitted to the computer in association with the relevant alphanumeric data.
In the article “Telescript: the emerging standard for intelligent messaging”, by J Hanckmann, published in PTR Philips Telecommunications Review, Vol.52, 1994, No.1, pages 15-19, there is described what are termed ‘remote procedure calls’, which make use of software agents. So-called ‘smart messages’ are described in which a correspondent can send messages that contain smart buttons. The message appears on the screen of the receiving device and, when the recipient clicks on the button, an action is performed.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The present invention is intended to provide communications apparatus which offers the possibility of controlling the complexity of billing operations.
Accordingly, in one aspect, the invention provides a service user apparatus arranged to automatically log service transactions, and service provider apparatus arranged to transmit account data through a communications network, the user apparatus being arranged to compare the account data with stored
British Telecommunications public limited company
Cumming William
Nixon & Vanderhye P.C.
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