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Monetization · telco

Carrier billing: not built, and what it would take

For an operator this is usually the first question, so it gets the first answer. Carrier billing, operator bundles, zero-rating and MSISDN sign-in exist in no service on this platform today. This page is what building them looks like, priced as an engagement rather than dressed as a feature.

The answer first

There is no carrier billing in this platform. No charge-to-bill flow, no operator bundle entitlement, no zero-rating configuration and no MSISDN sign-in. It appears in no service, no API contract and no backlog item, which is the most honest thing we can say about it.

We are writing the page anyway, because for a telco the alternative is a sales call that discovers this in week three. A vendor page that quietly omits the thing you most need is worse than one that names it and scopes it.

What the platform does have is the part carrier billing plugs into: an entitlement model that already accepts more than one source of truth about whether an account may watch. A subscription grant and a purchase grant are independent today, and a carrier grant would be a third of the same kind rather than a rewrite of the first two.

Detail

The four pieces, separately

They are usually asked for as one thing. They are four builds with different shapes and different dependencies.

01

Charge to the phone bill

An integration against the operator's own billing platform: a charge request, an asynchronous confirmation, and a reconciliation that survives both systems disagreeing. The integration surface is small; the reconciliation and the dispute handling are the work.

02

MSISDN sign-in

Identifying a subscriber by their number, usually through header enrichment on the operator's network or an OTP fallback off it. It changes the identity model, so it touches account linking and every path that assumes an email address.

03

Operator bundles

A data or voice pack that includes the service. Commercially this is a revenue-share agreement; technically it is a grant with a source and an expiry, which is close to the entitlement shape that already exists.

04

Zero-rating

Not billing at all — a network configuration that identifies this service's traffic and does not meter it. It depends on stable, enumerable delivery endpoints, which an owned edge in your own network makes considerably easier than a third-party CDN does.

Why it is scoped rather than shipped

Carrier billing cannot be built speculatively in any useful way. The API belongs to the operator, the commercial terms decide the flows, and two operators in the same market rarely present the same interface. A vendor claiming generic carrier billing support is claiming an adapter for a system they have not seen.

That is why this is engagement work and why the estimate comes after a conversation with your billing team rather than before it. The parts of it that are ours to own — the entitlement grant, the account linking, the reconciliation record — are specifiable in advance and small; the parts that are yours are what set the timeline.

One structural advantage is worth naming, because it is real and it is unusual. Zero-rating needs delivery endpoints that your network can identify reliably. When the edge sits inside your own infrastructure rather than behind a third party's shared CDN footprint, that identification is a routing fact rather than a negotiation with somebody else's IP ranges.

Questions

Questions

Do you support carrier billing?

No. There is no charge-to-bill flow, no operator bundle entitlement, no zero-rating configuration and no MSISDN sign-in anywhere in the platform today.

Could it be built for our network?

Yes, and it is a normal part of an engagement. It needs your billing platform's API, the commercial terms behind the bundle, and your team in the room — which is why we scope it with you rather than publishing a specification for it.

What can we launch with while it is built?

Subscriptions in taka through SSLCommerz, which reaches bKash, Nagad and cards, plus one-off purchases and event tickets. That is a running revenue model rather than a placeholder, and carrier billing lands beside it as an additional grant rather than replacing it.

Is zero-rating easier because the platform is on our infrastructure?

Materially, yes. Zero-rating identifies traffic by its endpoints, and an edge inside your own network gives you endpoints you control. It does not remove the commercial work, but it removes the argument about whose addresses are whose.

Talk to us with your billing team in the room

Every carrier integration is shaped by the operator's own billing platform and the commercial terms behind it. That is a conversation with your people, not a specification we can publish in advance.