2024 Q4 Release Notes

Release Notes for Q1 2025 are now live. Check it for the most recent changes and updates. For a complete overview of all Totogi releases, visit the Release Notes Archive.

New Functionality

• December 12, 2024 Totogi's Charging Engine now supports advanced multi-tenant announcement handling to improve customer interactions during service blocks or errors. This feature introduces the Announcement-Information AVP in Diameter Credit-Control Answer (CCA) responses, ensuring that subscribers receive accurate, MVNO-specific announcements for situations like exhausted quotas (Result-Code 4012) or unavailable plans (Result-Code 4010).
  With flexible configuration options at the rating group level, the feature ensures:
  
  • Precise tenant-based announcements in multi-tenant setups.
  • Hierarchy support, prioritizing child rating group configurations over parent groups.
  • Seamless compatibility with both 4G and 5G environments through automated AVP mapping.
• These enhancements streamline error messaging and elevate customer experience while maintaining compatibility with existing configurations.
  Note: At the moment, configuration is possible via API and soon will be introduced in Plan Design too.
• October 30, 2024 Totogi's CaaS Account Management API and EDRs have been extended to report Bill Cycle changes for postpaid subscribers. Immediately after changing a Bill Cycle date, the new Bill Cycle Date and the option to set a Long First Billing cycle are included as new fields in the GetAccount response (in addition to the current Bill Cycle properties).  See the GetAccount API query in our API docs for more information. An EDR is also created for the Bill Cycle change containing before and after Bill Cycle values.

Changed Functionality

• December 5, 2024 Totogi is introducing new enhancements to the management of monetary balances for postpaid subscribers within the CaaS platform. This feature ensures accurate tracking of monetary balance, improved bill cycle handling and credit limit management. The changes detailed below are designed to enhance the functionality, reliability, and usability of postpaid account balance management.

   

Key Changes:

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  • Monetary Balance Tracking Adjustments: The Total, Used, Credit Limit, Reserved, and Available balance fields have been redefined and optimized to support accurate and consistent balance management throughout the billing cycle.
  • Updated Available Balance Calculation: The formula for Available balance has been updated to include the credit limit, ensuring that the balance reflects the true available amount: Available = Total - Used - Reserved + Credit Limit
  • Introduction of the New Calculated Attribute: A new attribute, called “Value”, has been introduced that is dynamically calculated by the GetAccount API whenever it is called. This attribute is not stored in the database. It represents the unreserved owed amount. Formula: Value = Total - Used
  • Cycle Reset Logic: At the end of a billing cycle, the Total balance will be recalculated to carry over any unused amounts while the Used balance will reset to `0`.
  • Enhanced EDR Creation: EDRs will now be generated at the end of each billing cycle, capturing the balance state before and after the reset, including Total, Used, Reserved, and Available amounts, as well as the billed amount. EDRs will also be recorded whenever there is a change to the credit limit, detailing the old and new values.
• November 12, 2024 To improve accuracy and usability of balance reporting, Totogi has introduced updates to how various balance attributes are managed and reported. This update ensures that the balance object now returns real-time, precise values for the following attributes:

  * Reserved: The quantity of money or service (bytes, seconds, units) reserved by active sessions.
  * Used: The quantity of money or service consumed during the balance’s lifetime where lifetime is defined as the period between the balance ‘from’ and ‘to’ dates.
  * Available: The quantity of money or service available for consumption, excluding active reservations. At renewal, if rollover is configured, the available balance is also adjusted according to rollover settings (e.g., maximum rollover amount per period).
  * Total: The allowance of the balance configured in the plan service managing that balance. Total is the sum of Available, Reserved and Used. Modifications to the balance through the updateBalance API directly affect the Total value; credits increase Total and debits decrease Total. 

  Impact on Existing Accounts:
  * Following this release, EDRs will display Reserved amounts based only on the latest CCR, rather than cumulative session reservations. Please ensure that your systems are adapted to accommodate this change in reporting.
  * Previously, the Total value represented the sum of the available amount and the latest reservation. Now, Total reflects the configured allowance as set in the plan service. To obtain the previous total calculation, sum the Available and Reserved values. Please ensure your systems are adapted to accommodate these reporting changes.
  * Additionally, balances are now recalculated to correct minor discrepancies from a previous rounding issue. Users may observe slight adjustments in displayed available or used values, ensuring alignment with actual usage
  * The balanceValue of AccountBalanceInfo, which duplicated the previous total attribute, is now deprecated and scheduled for removal in January 2025. Please update your integrations to use sum of the Available and Reserved values instead to avoid any impact from this change.

Fixes and Improvements

• November 12, 2024 Handling of abandoned charging sessions has been improved by ensuring they now include essential session-related details—such as location and charging information. This improvement provides more complete and accurate records, reducing ambiguity in billing and supporting consistent session tracking across all session types.
• November 6, 2024  The Charging Engine now correctly denies event-type credit requests when no quota is available, preventing issues where a zero-unit grant led to unexpected SMS message delivery. This update ensures that when a subscriber lacks sufficient quota or their location cannot be determined, Charging Engine returns appropriate error codes:
  1. No Quota Available: QUOTA_LIMIT_REACHED (4012) is returned when a subscriber has exhausted their quota for an event-type request, signalling to the system that no further usage is allowed.
  2. Location Determination Issues: If the subscriber’s MCC/MNC cannot be determined and no Catch-All plan is available to handle the request, the system returns DIAMETER_INVALID_AVP_VALUE (5004) with details on the invalid parameters.

These changes enhance quota accuracy and prevent unintentional consumption.

• November 1, 2024  The CaaS algorithm used to determine the location identification for roaming has been improved to enhance the accuracy of identifying the user's network for charging purposes. This update integrates additional location information from user and signaling data. The following sequence is now used to determine user location for charging:
  1. Location Reporting Information
  2. User Location Information from session or charging data
  3. Originator Information (in E.164 format)
  4. VLR Number (in E.164 format)
  5. MSC Address (in E.164 format)
  6. Access Network Information from transfer records
• October 16, 2024 Resolved an issue where session terminations could result in incorrect charges from archived plans by ensuring that only active plans, or those previously reserved (and cancelled), are used. This fix guarantees proper session closure and accurate usage tracking.
  
  
• October 14, 2024 Resolved an issue where Spending Limit subscription responses (SLR) and notifications (SNR) did not reflect the correct Balance Type Counter states. With this fix, SLR and SNR messages now accurately reflect counter states, ensuring proper throttling behavior.
  
  
• October 10, 2024 Resolved an issue where Sy sessions failed to terminate correctly when the SessionId contained a semicolon (;), causing errors and duplicate subscriptions. The semicolon in the SessionId is now properly URL-encoded, ensuring successful session termination.