Interactive billing for broadband and multimedia services

Community networking services will range from entertainment to shopping to information services. The complexity of the transport and control architectures that are needed to support these services combined with the diverse needs of customers and service providers demand the development of new paradigms for monitoring service usage, and for rating and billing for the usage. Billing is an area of strategic importance to telecommunications service providers. Billing services provide strategic advantage in the marketplace where it is increasingly difficult to differentiate through product features and functionality, and where companies are trying to gain competitive advantage through customer service features. The usage information collection and management paradigm proposed is an essential component of meeting the billing needs for new, distributed broadband and multimedia services.