In industrial parks, commercial complexes, science parks, etc., the need for network billing is often more complicated than in single hotels or schools. There may be multiple users of the campus: employees who are permanently employed in a company, short-term tenants, visitors, property workers, and even customers of park-based restaurants or retail stores.
Yeah.Network billing systemFor example, the central challenge of the park landscape is how to achieve logical multi-area segregation under a physical continuum of network coverage and to configure differentiated fee rules for each region.
The most common option is VLAN (virtual local area network) segregation: different regions or user types correspond to VLAN ID, with separate strategies for each VLAN on the three-storey switchboard. For example, VLAN connects to the company’s employees in the enterprise and goes through monthly accounts at the firm’s expense; visitors VLAN go out of the public network and pay on time or by flow; property personnel VLAN enjoys free access but has bandwidth limits. This VLAN-based segregation programme is technically mature, but requires a high level of planning capacity for network engineers and the complexity of planning and maintenance will increase rapidly in large parks with a large number of APs.
Another more flexible approach is based onUser Identity TagDo strategy: The network billing system, when authenticated by the user, sends a corresponding Qos strategy and billing rule to the network device in accordance with the organization or identity of the user account. This approach does not depend on fixed VLAN advance planning; it simply updates the system's identity labels when the user is changed (e.g. business employees become visitors), and the network strategy automatically follows the adjustment and flexibility.
Differential fee design needs to be performed on multiple dimensions.Period varianceThe most common is free day working hours, which are paid on time at night or weekends, or different set prices for work days and holidays.Regional differencesAnother dimension: the network of core offices uses high-speed dedicated networks, and the public areas (circles, restaurants, corridors) have shared bandwidth, which are different in performance security and pricing.User type differencesThis is the third dimension: the resident enterprise is contracted on a monthly basis, temporary visitors are rounded up or by hour, and service personnel such as ex-sales use special temporary accounts with different costing logic for different types of users.
In park management practice, one of the real problems is thatBillingThe entire campus buys a large bandwidth line from the operator and then splits it internally to the respective host enterprise. For each enterprise, they care about how much they spend this month and how much they pay; for the park manager, they need to ensure that the amount of data used by each company is accurate and supports monthly billing. This requires that the network billing system not only be a tool for personal users but also allow for summary reports to be produced in an enterprise/tenant dimension and linked to the rental management system of the estate.
Visitors management is another high frequency requirement in the park landscape. There may be many visitors to and from the campus every day, who need temporary network access rights but cannot be combined with the internal networks of their regular staff. It is common practice that after a visitor has been registered at the front desk, the system automatically generates a temporary account number, which is valid for binding the visitors' records and automatically lapses when the visitor leaves. This process can be completely paperless, without manual intervention, and the visitors ' s sweep self-service certification can be completed; if it is not done, it is extremely inefficient that each visitor arrives by manually creating an account number at the front desk.
Security isolation cannot be left to the point of billing.Network billing systemDesigned to work with firewall strategies to ensure that even if two enterprises are connected to the same AP, they cannot communicate directly. The maintenance of this safe border is a detail that can be ignored in the design of a billing system but has an enormous impact when it comes to problems.
From a long-term operational perspective, the composition of the campus’s enterprises will continue to change: new firms are in place, old ones are out, and the size of the enterprise will require an increase in account numbers or bandwidth. The network billing system needs to provide easy account management and rule adjusting functions so that park operators can perform their daily changes autonomously, rather than relying on remote support from the manufacturer.
In the park landscape, the use of network resources is also to be managed as business data. Which area uses the network most frequently? Which enterprise has the fastest growing bandwidth consumption?——Both the efficiency of existing network resources and potential value-added service opportunities can be judged, such as recommending upgrades to high-flow enterprises.Network billing systemThe ability to export such analytical reports by region and by tenant dimensions is an important indicator of the assessment under the park landscape.
The campus network billing is an area that needs to combine the depth of technical programmes and operational logic. Regional segregation and differential charging sound two separate issues, but in actual deployment they are interdependent——The isolation approach determines how fine the rules fall into a range of particles, and the complexity of the rules affects the choice of the separation options. At the start-up phase, it is more likely that these two dimensions will be discussed together than separate analysis to produce a consistent solution.