Billing Considerations for Paging

The billing function is capable of billing both paging and message delivery on a per-call basis. Remember, however, that the server site is the calling party and thereby responsible for any charges that accrue when paging or message delivery calls are made to the outside telephone network. As stated earlier, pager calls are usually of very short duration, but message delivery calls can be quite long. Since the cost of each call depends on the time of day that it is made, the duration of the call, the distance between the server and the user, and the rates of the local telephone company, the server makes no provisions for this aspect of the billing.

Outdial Billing

Outdials such as paging calls can, however, be billed back to a mailbox owner’s account. This form of outdial billing can be implemented through individual mailboxes’ configuration and is explained more fully in the Mailboxes section.

Example:

Henry Huggins has a pager and has his pager calls billed to his calling card number. To perform this manually, you lift the telephone receiver; wait for a dial tone; dial 9 to get an outside line; dial 0-612-555-4534 (0 indicates you will charge the call); wait for a computer tone; dial the calling card number; wait for another tone; dial his mailbox number, 6446; then dial # to tell the pager that all the display data has been entered. (This activates the pager). The dial string for these actions is:

In this case, such as in Example 2 (DID Display pager), configuration is complex, since there is not enough room in the mailbox parameter (Pager Number) to specify the individual pager number, the calling card number, and the display data, all of which are unique to this pager. In most installations, however, DID display pagers share a common area code and prefix (0-612-555, in this case), and configuring the area code and prefix into the outdial index allows more than one pager to use that pager system.

The organization of the dial string is as follows:

The paging Mailbox Worksheet entries are:

Individual Rates

The server’s billing rates structure does allow you to specify an individual rate for each pager system. This rate is multiplied by the number of pages that are issued for the mailbox. If you put message delivery accounts and radio pager accounts on separate pager systems, you can increase the charges on the pager systems that serve message delivery subscribers to compensate for any toll charges that the telephone company levies.