BACKGROUND

Mobile electronic devices (e.g., smart phones, personal digital assistants, computer tablets) provide advanced computing capabilities and services to users. Examples of the services include voice communications, text and other messaging communications, video and other multimedia communications, and streaming services. Often, users, via their mobile devices, access such services as customers or subscribers of telecommunications carriers, which provide telecommunications networks within which the users make voice calls, send text messages, send and receive data, and so on.

The telecommunications carriers can provide their subscribers with various service plans. For example, carriers can offer and provide contractual subscription plans, where a customer is locked into an ongoing plan for a certain duration. As another example, carriers can offer and provide prepaid, or non-contractual plans, where a customer determines, during or after each segment of the plan, whether to renew the plan.

Carriers offer customers a variety of contractual and prepaid plans of service. For example, one carrier can offer a low cost, prepaid plan, where a customer receives a basic menu of services (e.g., unlimited voice and text communications, and 1 gigabyte of data per month), as well as a higher level, and higher cost, plan, where a customer receives an enhanced or greater menu of services (e.g., unlimited voice and text communications, and 4 gigabytes of data per month). Other carriers can offer similar plans and services.

The prepaid accounts, because they are limited both in services and access, can be cumbersome to manage and charge for utilization, especially because mechanisms that enable online metering of voice calls can malfunction. As a result, carriers either terminate the voice calls until the metering mechanism goes online or forego charging the subscriber for the voice call. This and other problems exist with respect to performing online metering for prepaid accounts and then forgoing charging customers for usage of the prepaid services on a network.

