Jet Billing comes in an Education package which is used by Universities and Schools to provide data management including quota-ing and reporting and voice billing and reporting.

Jet is the preferred Educational cost recovery and billing system in Australia, with over one quarter of Universities using Jet for data and/or voice billing and management. This experience has given Obsidian the tools and understanding to create a system that solves the unique problems that Universities, TAFEs, Schools and Educational Associations face with data and voice management.

Jet Education comes with a number of specially designed features and that allow the system to fit seamlessly into an Educational facility network. Being the creators of Jet, Obsidian are available to customise the billing system to specifically suit each customer’s individual needs.

Integration to Network Edge Devices

Jet integrates with a number of edge devices, including Cisco’s Service Selection Gateway (SSG), Intelligent Services Gateway (ISG), Service Control Engine (SCE) and Netflow; BlueCoat PacketShaper (previously Packeteer) and SGProxy; Procera’s PacketLogic, Juniper’s JFlow; Fortinet; Websense; and our latest addition, Allot. Other devices are being added continuously, so please ask a consultant about other devices not listed here.
Integration with an edge device enables Jet to pull information from the device and perform deep packet analysis and reporting, shape users and specified protocols (dependant on the device), and on-net vs off-net accounting and billing.

LDAP Integration

LDAP integration performs authentication against an LDAP, Microsoft Active Directory or Novell database, allowing users to log onto the Institute’s file network and internet with a single sign-on.

Quota Management

Jet’s advanced quota management and hierarchical structure are designed so that Educational Institutes can assign quota to users and easily assign management levels to departmental administrators Quota can be assigned in various ways, including differentiation between undergraduate and postgraduate students, and staff.

Quota can also be assigned by megabyte or by currency amount. In practical terms, this feature allows Institutes to assign 200Mb per month to Undergrads, 300Mb per month to postgrads, and unlimited usage to staff. Alternatively, students and staff can also be assigned quota by department or faculty, or usage can be tracked without quota rules put in place at all.

 

Hierarchies

Hierarchical management tools let the Institute set a tiered management system, so that department administrators can manage all staff and students within their department, faculty administrators can manage departments, etc. Alternatively, centralised management can be put in place to allow the IT department management over the entire system.

Adjustments

Adjustments are available to administrators to manually add or remove quota, suspend or activate accounts and add one-off fees and charges.

Customer Care Portal

The customer care portal allows users to view their usage and use the credit card or BPAY facility to instantly top-up accounts, while Jet’s prepaid tools allow clients to produce scratch cards so that students can easily obtain further quota from student services such as the library.

Provisioning

Jet’s flexible provisioning system enables the client to set up automatic emails to users, for example when their account reaches a certain point, such as 80% of assigned usage.

Wireless

Wireless billing and tracking is also included, with the one system able to track and manage the client’s network and wireless network.

IP Manager

The IP Manager module enables management of IP address ranges within Jet, while the Location Manager module provides the ability to manage multiple access locations, as well as mapping of user login locations to enable differential billing based on login location.
Jet is white branded, and customers can easily change the look and feel of the system through the web interface.

Redundancy and Failover

Addition modules are also available, including a Redundancy/Failover module that licenses a second server to act as a failover.

Report Server – Data

The Jet Billing System has a Reporting Server Module that requires a secondary server to provide a number of suites of reports to clients.

All reports in the Report server are baked hourly, daily and monthly, and can be sorted and searched through the interface. A number of reports also come with Graphs (highlighted with a #)

  1. URL reports
    • Global URL report including hostname aggregation with click through to full URL report.
    • User URL report including hostname aggregation with click through to full URL report.
  1. Application reports #
    • Addition of Summary to Application in Global Usage Over Time, User Usage Over Time and User Usage for IP Over Time
    • Global Usage Over Time for Application and Summary to Top 20 Users.
    • User Usage Over Time For Application and Summary to Top 20 IPs.
    • User Usage For IP Over Time For Application|
  2. Usage Reports – #
    • Global Usage Over Time and Summary to Top 20 users.
    • User Usage Over Time and Summary to Top 20 IPs.
    • User Usage For IP Over Time
  3. Server Metrics: #
    • Memory
    • CPU
    • Requests per second (eg Login, logouts etc)
    • Request type (eg, Radius, SNMP, Captive Portal etc)
    • Number of connections
    • Response time
  4. Financial report – eg export to finance system – typically baked monthly

Voice Inetgration

Voice data can enter the system in a variety of ways, including:

  • Direct access to an Asterisk database.
  • CDR files from a PABX system.
  • CDR files from an upstream provider.

Jet’s voice billing module includes a generic usage importer, which gives Universites, TAFEs and Schools the flexibility to add new data types, such as Video and Music management and billing.

Jet integrates with a number of systems, including

  • Cisco’s Call Manager Systems
  • Ericsson
  • NEC PABX’s
  • along with a long list of other products.

Invoicing & Integration to Finance Systems

Jet’s invoicing features include fixed-date or anniversary billing, automatic e-mailing of PDF invoices as well as a range of printable invoice export formats. Invoices are customisable, and can include line items generated from outside the Jet system. Jet supports real-time credit card processing via a range of payment gateways, and provides automated actions on overdue accounts.

Obsidian provides integration with external systems with easy .csv exports of all reports. This means that Jet can export financial reports to the University/TAFE’s financial system, reducing the amount of administrative work.
Jet imports call data and then rates the calls based on the upstream provider’s call classification codes, then rates according to the user’s plan structure to provide a margin on top of the wholesale cost of the call to the client.

Customised modules are available for Voice and VoIP billing including:

  • Bill reconciliation
  • Full A end to B end rating tables
  • Directory services

Report Server for Voice

The Jet Billing System has a Reporting Server Module that requires a secondary server to provide a number of suites of reports to clients. There are three options currently available with the report server.

All reports in the Report server are baked hourly, daily and monthly, and can be sorted and searched through the interface. A number of reports also come with Graphs (highlighted with a #)

  1. Global Usage Reports: #
    1. Global usage reports show a summary of calls across all accounts allowing you to easily view the most active callers, called number or highest call duration. The global data can even breakdown by call type, so limiting the summary to international, local, std, etc.
    2. Global usage reports may have multiple filters applied allowing the administrator to see which users are the highest callers of a given number or have the highest duration.
    3. Reports results can be searched, printed, saved and re-ordered all from the client browser.
    4. Quota alert report showing users that have been limited due to quota policy levels being breached.
  2. Call Manager Reporting:
    1. Call Congestion showing trunk congestion
    2. Call Route Inspection
    3. Unallocated usage report
    4. Unidentified services
  3. User Reports: #
    1. Voice usage reports are very similar to the administrator reports detailed above except they are restricted to the authenticated account.
    2. Billing reports allow a user to view and search call records billed based on the users invoices.
    3. Cost Centre base usage reporting allows access to the full range of reports using a subset of the accounts that are available to the cost centre. This report is hierarchy based and requires the hierarch to be setup correctly along with permissions.
  4. Financial Reports:
    1. View global billing summaries by product type, date, contract, cost, etc. This allows the viewing of billing summaries by product (a phone or device is normally attached to a single product, although additional products may be used for voicemail, call forwarding, etc)
    2. Top X by cost or usage.
    3. The User Billing Summary shows cost based history for each users product over time.
    4. The New Accounts by Referrer report provides a sales brief on new accounts by the sales, department or office generating the new revenue.
    5. Revenue Year-to-Date Report optionally broken down by cost center (if available) or month.
    6. Cost Centre Journals calculating a monthly breakdown by cost centre for users with 1 or more cost centre allocations during the month. This report will only be available if cost centre are configured.
    7. Quota purchase report showing what accounts are purchasing the most additional quote.
  5. Stock Control:
    1. Device History Report showing how devices have shifted from account to account.
    2. Usage By Device shows a summary of usage by device that leads back to the account usage for a more detailed data inspection.
  1. Server Metrics: #
    1. Memory
    2. CPU
    3. Disk IO
    4. Web User Interface Response Times
    5. Collector performance