From Alexander Bell to the Big Three: A Brief History of the Development of Billing Systems
Giant subscriber base growth in the 20s and 30s of the last century. The appearance of "intercity". Distribution of time-based connections. And, finally, the arrival of cellular communication as the most significant breakthrough in the development of billing systems. We will tell about their evolution throughout the history of telephone communication.
August 4, 1922 in the United States phones were silenced. 13 million phones were turned off for one minute - this is how American telephonists expressed grief over the death of Alexander Bell. We owe much to this inventor, including the patenting of a telephone (although the Italian Antonio Meucci was recognized as the inventor). Birthday of telephone communication is considered to be the date of patent application, February 14, 1876.
An interesting engineering novelty was instantly appreciated: a year later the first telephone station was built in the USA, and after five years European expansion took place, and the devices rang in Berlin, St. Petersburg, Moscow and Warsaw. Communication was expensive, but, nevertheless, claimed. Simultaneously with communication services, a simple billing appeared.
')
"The Commissioner appeals to all state, city and public institutions, as well as to all persons who wish to subscribe to phones, with the obedient request to make a statement to the office of Moscow phones," - this was the advertisement in Moscow newspapers. The cost of the subscription was 250 rubles per year. The average salary of a worker is about 60 rubles per month. However, the first phones were clearly not for workers. If we transfer the monthly fee to the modern price system, then the annual right to use the telephone line would now cost about 400 thousand rubles.
Despite the prices, by the beginning of the 20th century about 7,000 telephones had been installed in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Began to appear competition. The Swedish-Danish-Russian Telephone Joint-Stock Company offered the lowest monthly fee: a total of 79 rubles (according to other sources, 63 p 20 kopecks) against 250 from the former Bell company. Perhaps this was the first case of price wars between telecom operators in our country.
Soon, Russia broke several telephone records. The Moscow telephone exchange became the largest in Europe: it served 60 thousand numbers. Between the two capitals stretched 660 km of lines, which were about 200 negotiations per day. Line London-Paris length of 498 km left behind.
A subscriber base appeared, an “intercity” came - and the era of complicated calculations had arrived. 60 thousand subscribers - already a lot, even for simple charging subscription fees. At first, the calculation was carried out at machine-counting stations, in the 1930s the simplest adding machines appeared, and closer to the 1960s, electromechanical adding machines and punching machines appeared. In the 70s of the twentieth century, electronics were connected to the calculations. The maintenance of the billing started a computer.
However, computing technology was far from all. For example, time-based billing remained unreachable, because the overwhelming number of switches did not allow to register connection time. Time-based payment was applied only in long-distance communication, where the telephony attendant first monitored the connection time.
Automatic telephone communication and automatic settlements for it became possible after the so-called began to appear later in the mid-seventies of the last century. APUS devices (Timed Connectivity Equipment). They were additionally installed on the operated analog switches and systems of automatic number identification (AON) of the calling subscriber. Such systems allowed to automatically determine the number from which a long-distance or international call was made. Then the invoice for services was issued to the subscriber.
It looks like APUS
What kind of baggage did the communications industry use to the Internet era?
Modern youth can hardly imagine what a monopoly in telephony is and what value the telephone was in the second half of the 20th century. In the telecommunications market, monopolies reigned in many states, and the capabilities of operators and the interests of their customers practically did not go beyond the traditional voice communication. Companies providing communication channels could not afford to rush.
With billing, everything was exactly the same: the goal of all systems was only to facilitate the automatic collection of cash receipts. From a technical point of view, they, as a rule, were multi-terminal systems with central computers (mainframes) and hard connections, batch processing of data, a huge number of lines of machine code and an uncomfortable interface.
Then it's cellular time. Roaming, Internet and data transfer - now it is our routine, and then the most important question arose - how to consider all this?
The first “real” Russian billing system was created in 1992 in St. Petersburg by Peter-Service for Delta Telecom, the mobile operator of the NMT-450 standard, the first fully automatic 1G standard. With the help of 18 engineers, we created an alternative to the American billing system Electronic Data Systems (this company was acquired by HP in 2008). In the process, we were seriously helped by the experience of working at a long-distance station - at that time the only place where telephone bills were billed. For half a year we have made the main billing module with support for tariff plans, selection of tariff records from the switch and printing of invoices.
The next few years we were engaged in the creation of the first replicable information-billing system in Russia, and in 1996 the result of this work, PETER-SERVICE BIS, entered the market and began to provide billing for North-West GSM, the operator of the GSM-900 standard.
Gradually, the industry has developed an understanding that for a full-fledged work, a telecom operator needs not only billing. The counting functions of the system remained fundamental, but they were no longer the focus. Now all telecom operators have a full-fledged BSS (Business Support System), which is responsible for the management of services, customer loyalty, and marketing of the operator, and much more.
Now Russian operators handle about a billion calls per day and charge hundreds of millions of bills a month. In turn, the soft description has also stepped far forward, and current technologies allow the development of highly flexible solutions ready for integration and scaling with the help of the domain architecture. The functional framework “Billing and Finance” still combines prepaid and post-paid calculations, online charges, balance-management life cycles, receivables management. The traffic component in all its diversity is included in the contour Policy. Just above these basic blocks is a very interesting domain, Ordering, which manages the connection of products and the collection of orders. He works in close conjunction with the grocery catalog and CRM.
By the way, 10 years ago some experts predicted a possible merger of billing and CRM. Now it is obvious that these systems have long since moved away from each other, but at the same time they have become more integrated. Why did it happen? The fact is that billing and CRM historically developed in parallel. Sometimes CRM is so powerful and developed that the operator changes the billing core without replacing the CRM, which it separately develops and enriches with additional modules. CRM can be from another vendor. It may not even be industry-specific, just with good customization.
Above all this diversity are the channels of communication between the operator and the client - the so-called frontend.
Most people do not even anticipate how many complex IT products are created and deployed to serve the communication needs of mankind. At the same time, products are modified, developed and are learning to provide new services. About why the telecom software is now experiencing another “birth”, read the next article.
Materials for publication were provided by the chief analyst at Peter-Service, Tatiana Atanova, and the chief engineer, Lev Dich.
August 4, 1922 in the United States phones were silenced. 13 million phones were turned off for one minute - this is how American telephonists expressed grief over the death of Alexander Bell. We owe much to this inventor, including the patenting of a telephone (although the Italian Antonio Meucci was recognized as the inventor). Birthday of telephone communication is considered to be the date of patent application, February 14, 1876.
An interesting engineering novelty was instantly appreciated: a year later the first telephone station was built in the USA, and after five years European expansion took place, and the devices rang in Berlin, St. Petersburg, Moscow and Warsaw. Communication was expensive, but, nevertheless, claimed. Simultaneously with communication services, a simple billing appeared.
')
The last century
"The Commissioner appeals to all state, city and public institutions, as well as to all persons who wish to subscribe to phones, with the obedient request to make a statement to the office of Moscow phones," - this was the advertisement in Moscow newspapers. The cost of the subscription was 250 rubles per year. The average salary of a worker is about 60 rubles per month. However, the first phones were clearly not for workers. If we transfer the monthly fee to the modern price system, then the annual right to use the telephone line would now cost about 400 thousand rubles.
Despite the prices, by the beginning of the 20th century about 7,000 telephones had been installed in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Began to appear competition. The Swedish-Danish-Russian Telephone Joint-Stock Company offered the lowest monthly fee: a total of 79 rubles (according to other sources, 63 p 20 kopecks) against 250 from the former Bell company. Perhaps this was the first case of price wars between telecom operators in our country.
Soon, Russia broke several telephone records. The Moscow telephone exchange became the largest in Europe: it served 60 thousand numbers. Between the two capitals stretched 660 km of lines, which were about 200 negotiations per day. Line London-Paris length of 498 km left behind.
A subscriber base appeared, an “intercity” came - and the era of complicated calculations had arrived. 60 thousand subscribers - already a lot, even for simple charging subscription fees. At first, the calculation was carried out at machine-counting stations, in the 1930s the simplest adding machines appeared, and closer to the 1960s, electromechanical adding machines and punching machines appeared. In the 70s of the twentieth century, electronics were connected to the calculations. The maintenance of the billing started a computer.
However, computing technology was far from all. For example, time-based billing remained unreachable, because the overwhelming number of switches did not allow to register connection time. Time-based payment was applied only in long-distance communication, where the telephony attendant first monitored the connection time.
Automatic telephone communication and automatic settlements for it became possible after the so-called began to appear later in the mid-seventies of the last century. APUS devices (Timed Connectivity Equipment). They were additionally installed on the operated analog switches and systems of automatic number identification (AON) of the calling subscriber. Such systems allowed to automatically determine the number from which a long-distance or international call was made. Then the invoice for services was issued to the subscriber.
What kind of baggage did the communications industry use to the Internet era?
Modern youth can hardly imagine what a monopoly in telephony is and what value the telephone was in the second half of the 20th century. In the telecommunications market, monopolies reigned in many states, and the capabilities of operators and the interests of their customers practically did not go beyond the traditional voice communication. Companies providing communication channels could not afford to rush.
With billing, everything was exactly the same: the goal of all systems was only to facilitate the automatic collection of cash receipts. From a technical point of view, they, as a rule, were multi-terminal systems with central computers (mainframes) and hard connections, batch processing of data, a huge number of lines of machine code and an uncomfortable interface.
Mobile era
Then it's cellular time. Roaming, Internet and data transfer - now it is our routine, and then the most important question arose - how to consider all this?
The first “real” Russian billing system was created in 1992 in St. Petersburg by Peter-Service for Delta Telecom, the mobile operator of the NMT-450 standard, the first fully automatic 1G standard. With the help of 18 engineers, we created an alternative to the American billing system Electronic Data Systems (this company was acquired by HP in 2008). In the process, we were seriously helped by the experience of working at a long-distance station - at that time the only place where telephone bills were billed. For half a year we have made the main billing module with support for tariff plans, selection of tariff records from the switch and printing of invoices.
The next few years we were engaged in the creation of the first replicable information-billing system in Russia, and in 1996 the result of this work, PETER-SERVICE BIS, entered the market and began to provide billing for North-West GSM, the operator of the GSM-900 standard.
Gradually, the industry has developed an understanding that for a full-fledged work, a telecom operator needs not only billing. The counting functions of the system remained fundamental, but they were no longer the focus. Now all telecom operators have a full-fledged BSS (Business Support System), which is responsible for the management of services, customer loyalty, and marketing of the operator, and much more.
Now Russian operators handle about a billion calls per day and charge hundreds of millions of bills a month. In turn, the soft description has also stepped far forward, and current technologies allow the development of highly flexible solutions ready for integration and scaling with the help of the domain architecture. The functional framework “Billing and Finance” still combines prepaid and post-paid calculations, online charges, balance-management life cycles, receivables management. The traffic component in all its diversity is included in the contour Policy. Just above these basic blocks is a very interesting domain, Ordering, which manages the connection of products and the collection of orders. He works in close conjunction with the grocery catalog and CRM.
By the way, 10 years ago some experts predicted a possible merger of billing and CRM. Now it is obvious that these systems have long since moved away from each other, but at the same time they have become more integrated. Why did it happen? The fact is that billing and CRM historically developed in parallel. Sometimes CRM is so powerful and developed that the operator changes the billing core without replacing the CRM, which it separately develops and enriches with additional modules. CRM can be from another vendor. It may not even be industry-specific, just with good customization.
Above all this diversity are the channels of communication between the operator and the client - the so-called frontend.
Most people do not even anticipate how many complex IT products are created and deployed to serve the communication needs of mankind. At the same time, products are modified, developed and are learning to provide new services. About why the telecom software is now experiencing another “birth”, read the next article.
Materials for publication were provided by the chief analyst at Peter-Service, Tatiana Atanova, and the chief engineer, Lev Dich.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/343102/
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