System and method for billing for transactions conducted over the internet from within an intranet

摘要

A system and method is disclosed for performing centralized billing for transactions conducted by a user on a terminal (101) connected on an Intranet (103) with an Internet Service Provider (ISP) (115) connected to the Internet (104). A Firewall Gateway (105) interconnects the Intranet and the Internet and removes the terminal's IP address from packets transmitted by the user's terminal to the ISP on the Internet. A Session Manager (116) stores in a database (117) the associations between the IP address of the user's terminal and the user's identity, and between the IP address and the Connection ID of the connection established between the Firewall Gateway and the ISP for an ongoing transaction between the user and the ISP. A Billing Platform (120) receives a signal indicating the cost of the transaction and the Connection ID associated with the transaction from the ISP. The Billing Platform then accesses the database (117) of the Session Manager to determine the identity of the user from the Connection ID and an account of the identified user is retrieved in a database (127) associated with the Billing Platform. The account is then billed for the cost of the transaction and forwarded to a billing entity (130-1-130-5) for billing to the user in accordance with the user's pre-established billing mechanism.