Subscribers of local telephone services often sign up for telephone services that are billed out on a monthly basis. Occasionally, some subscribers who are financially capable of paying their bills have difficulty making timely payments for their local telephone services. These late payments result in late payment penalties for the subscriber and added costs to the telephone service provider. In extreme cases the subscriber's delinquency can adversely affect her credit rating. In an attempt to solve this problem, several types of prepaid telephone services are available that allow for a subscriber to prepay for services.
One existing type of system treats prepaid local telephone services (hereinafter “prepaid dialtone”) in the same manner as a conventional long distance prepaid card service. The local exchange carrier (LEC) and/or interexchange carrier (IXC) for a particular subscriber will forward all calls to a dedicated prepaid dialtone switch that will determine if the caller has a credit balance in her account. If the prepaid dialtone switch determines that the call can go through, it then routes the call to the local end office and maintains an active connection to the call so that the prepaid dialtone switch may monitor the call and update its database after the call. A disadvantage of this form of prepaid dialtone is that the telephone network needs to maintain a continuous connection to the database monitoring the prepaid subscriber so that the time of the call is monitored and the charges will be debited on, for instance, a per second basis.
Another version of a prepaid dialtone system utilizes a separate billing service that generates monthly statements and posts deposits received. This system acts to accept prepayment of services but does not adequately address the problem of late payments because there is no mechanism for automatically limiting a subscriber's usage or automatically shutting off the subscriber's service at the end of the prepaid service period.
Accordingly, there is a need for an improved system and method of implementing prepaid dialtone services.