Hi i have a question, i have an idea to implement one way whatsapp billing in a telecoms company. So only the caller has to have data to be able to initiate calls. Even if the recipient has no data the call will go through and bill the caller double or a fixed higher price. The engineer at the telecoms company i pitched this to is asking some technical questions on how this might be implemented, your advice is valued.
I am the engineer responsible for these sort of issues boss. Let’s have the architecture on how you see your system/app sitting in the value chain on making a WhatsApp call. Remember we have nodes that are already within the value chain i.e from your billing engine, your gateways(charging), policy control etc, we would want to know where we place your app so we see how it interacts with the existing nodes and possibly what changes can be made for us to achieve the desired result.
Hi There,
I am not sure if this is still your interest to do it or not, yet, there are few points to consider.
1- The amount you can charge is too small and doesnt woth the hussle.
2- it is better to have your own OTT and controll such thing (this is what I have now) we allow users to continue voice and SMS services, yet, file sharing, location sharing and other things are disabled once they are out of balance. (for a week)
From the technical point of view, this can be done with TDF and PCRF, you can detect the whatsapp packets through an inline traffic detection function and then signal to the PCRF through Sd interface to add a specifc policy, such as allowing whatsapp for that user. (havent done it, yet, to me this is the only way going forward)
So for whats app or any OTT services to be charged seperately the easiest way is as follows.keep an eye on the dedicated bearer creation and decide upon which service is using. whats app mobile application usually uses QCI 9 for data dn QCI 7 for voice or video call so PCRF gets a gx trigger before dedicated bearer getting estsblished.you can use the differentiater as either FQDN or ip addresses when you are getting after resolving them.so those can be preconfigured in PCRF and allocate a rating group or if it is online charging your PCRF can request the rating group. from OCS via Sy interface then share the rating group with PGW which it will trigger OCS for online charging via Gy interface.