Open APIs

Hi all,

Is there a way to distinguish between Prepaid vs. Postpaid product offerings in TMF APIs? If yes, how can this be achieved? Or does TMF provide distinction of Postpaid vs. Prepaid at a different resource than Product Offerings?

Hi Varun,

To my knowledge, there is no such specific way to say that a product offering is prepaid or postpaid, but you have several alternatives to model that. Right now, the following come to mind:

• You may extend the Product Offering class with Prepaid and Postpaid Product Offering specific classes. Regarding the API, this will be reflected in the field @type of the Product Offering resource.
• You may use a characteristic associated with the product offering. For example, one named 'contract_type' that could take the value 'prepaid' or 'postpaid'.
• You may just classify prepaid and postpaid offerings into different categories.

Hope it helps.

Best regards,

Hi Varun, Abel,

A productOffering doesn't have to be specific for Prepaid or Postpaid. If needed to restrict the use of productOfferings this is usually done through MarketSegment by having separate Prepaid and Postpaid. A ProductOffering then targets a marketsegment.

The SID model provides a converged billing model that allows a customer to be set up with CustomerBillingAccounts that have a creditlimit and a set of balances. 

A customer with a credit limit of 0 can basically only consume services via its prepaid balances.

In that sense prepaid or postpaid is a marketsegment and customers in that marketsegment get their CustomerBillingAccount set up in a particular way.

Regards