Telephone-linked commodity-billing method

Telephonic communications – Telephone line or system combined with diverse electrical... – Remote indication over telephone line

Reexamination Certificate

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Details

C379S106060, C379S106070, C379S106080, C379S106110

Reexamination Certificate

active

06240167

ABSTRACT:

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of Invention
The invention relates to the field of automatic remote billing. In particular, the present invention relates to a method for directly converting commodity-consumption data into consumer billing via existing telecommunications systems. More particularly, this invention relates to an automated bill-generation method using existing telecommunications billing systems for remotely generated, automatically delivered commodities and services.
2. Prior Art
A variety of remotely transmitted commodities are provided to a delivery system in bulk, on a continuously available basis, so that individual users of these commodities can consume them in such quantities and at such times as each user's needs may demand. These commodities can be divided into two categories—Category I and Category II, respectively—based on the way in which they are provided and billed for. Category I includes the traditional utilities such as water, gas, electricity, and is characterized in part by the fact that each is continuously available at each individual user's site, at which site the user taps into the commodity. Each Category I commodity is also characterized by the fact that its usage by each user is recorded by a meter at the individual user's site and the consequence that the provider of that commodity must employ human meter readers to periodically visit each of the users' sites in order to collect usage data and then to carry this data back to the provider's site for conversion into billing data. In addition to recording the amount of the commodity used, the meter may also make a record of the times of use, that information to be used, for example, in time-of-use dependent billing.
Each traditional Category I commodity has had its own dedicated delivery means—including, respectively, electric transmission lines, gas lines, and water pipes. However, the proliferation of other transmission means—including AM/FM radio broadcast, and more recently, microwave, satellite, and cable transmission, as well as the increasing use of the World Wide Web—has made possible the delivery in this continuously available manner of a variety of other commodities, such as entertainment and information. These commodities tend to fall into Category II.
Category II commodities can also be continuously available at sites remote from their provider. A significant difference is that when the commodity is demanded by the user, it must at that time be sent out by the provider. (A simple example is the pay-per-view movie sent out to an individual user over a TV cable when the user requests it.) While such on-demand commodities may be “continuously available,” their availability is at the source, delivery is made in reaction to a demand from the user to the source, and so monitoring of delivered quantities and delivery times is customarily done at the source, rather than at the point of delivery. In other words, there is no need for the meter readers; billing data is from the outset located at the provider's site. Thus the remotely provided, continuously available commodities making up Category II are much more convenient to their provider, in terms of accounting and billing, and generally less expensive in terms of overhead. On the other hand, the requirement that the user undertake a specific initiation-action separate from simply starting to use the commodity (as one would do with Category I commodities) and the concomitant uncertainty of commodity accessibility at the time the initiation-action is taken makes the consumption of Category II commodities less convenient for the user. It is desirable to provide the ease-of-consumption of Category I commodities with something approaching the efficiency of billing of Category II commodities.
A survey of the prior art reveals many attempts to improve the efficiency of billing for Category I commodities. These attempts all incorporate to one degree or another automatically reading meters for collecting and storing consumption data in machine-readable form, consumption data that is then transferred to the provider's central location, by means of a traditional meter-reader carrying a data-collection device or by more automatic means. Once collected and transferred to the provider's site, these data still must be manipulated in various ways to generate customer billing. For example, one of the earliest of these methods is described by Lane et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 3,231,670; issued in 1966). Lane et al. employs a meter-coupling device capable of generating audio tones, the combination and frequency of which indicate the needle position of each of the dials of the meter that is periodically polled by the provider. The more common automatically reading meter in use today, however, is ofthe type described by Bogaart et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 3,553,376; issued in 1971). Meters of the Bogaart et al. type generate an electronic pulse for each incremental unit of consumption detected by the meter, which uses the pulses to continually update the accumulated total usage stored at the user location, either in the meter itself or in some associated device. Some of these counting-and-storing meters have the facility to also record time and/or time-of-use data. Some such meters continue to display the usage data on mechanical dials, while others display the data on digital readout displays. In any event, the total usage stored by the meter is then collected by a meter reader with a data collector device that plugs into the usage-storage device at the user's site.
All of the automatically reading prior-art meters store usage data in the form of the total number of units—be it units of the commodity consumed or monetary units, which may depend jointly on the amount consumed and the time at which it was consumed—that have accumulated since the time that the connection was made and the meter activated. Thus, when the data are transferred to the commodity provider, that provider must then determine usage for the current billing period by subtracting from the latest reading the reading at the end of the previous billing period. Although this accounting and billing method is firmly rooted in long-standing common practice, it is archaically cumbersome, requiring periodic calculations dependent on the maintenance of a base of historical data. Furthermore, each such Category I continuously available commodity demands its own proprietary accounting and billing system and related historical data storage system, the maintenance of which is burdensome and expensive.
Even with the inefficiencies noted, the automatically reading meters are beneficial in that they eliminate the source of human error that existed when meters were read visually and recorded manually. This is indeed a strength and represents a significant advance over the earlier tradition that demanded maximum human intervention in the collection of commodity usage-data.
The next step after the introduction of automatic storage of usage data was the idea of automated usage-data collection without the need of a human meter reader traveling to the user's location. The prior art, including Lane et al. and Bogaart et al., discloses two general types of remote automatic-meter-reading systems using automatically reading meters. Both generally rely on the transmission of meter-collected data via telephone lines between the user's location and that of the provider. There are exceptions to the telephone-transmission-model, such as the method taught by Martin (U.S. Pat. No. 3,742,142; issued in 1973) wherein data transmission may be accomplished via “AC carrier lines or radio” in addition to telephone, and by Jahr et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 4,707,852; issued in 1987) which includes “coaxial cables” along with “public switched telephone networks” as transmission means. Also, the system disclosed by Blethen et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 3,937,890; issued in 1976) teaches a method of data transmission from the user's automatically reading meter to the provider's data-colle

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