Amber Prepaid Balance Enquiry

The Amber Balance Enquiry Module enables subscribers and airtime dealers to retrieve account balances from either an IN Platform or from Emerald Realtime using a simple USSD request.

The advantages of this approach are:

Subscribers can access their balances directly without placing load on the SMS-C and without requiring costly SMS-C licenses
Dealers can store the phone number to retrieve balances directly in their phone book
The system will prompt for a PIN, increasing security
Turn-around time is reduced

In excess of 75% of the SMS messages processed by an Emerald Airtime Management system are prepaid balance enquiries. Operators simultaneously increase the overall system capacity while reducing SMS-C license costs by implementing USSD balance enquiry in their network.

The EBE Module can either communicate with the IN directly or re-use the Emerald Realtime IN integration. In cases where the EBE connects via Emerald, operators can save licensing costs as this module does not require additional connection licenses.

The EBE Module connects to the following network elements:

The IN Platform for validating MSISDN numbers and retrieving prepaid balances
An SNMP Manager for monitoring statistics and receiving alarms
A USSD gateway such as the Amber USSD Media gateway for receiving USSD requests