"Billing system" means something different depending on whether you're talking about a home subscriber paying monthly for a fixed connection, or a walk-in guest buying an hour of WiFi at a shop. Most ISPs eventually need to run both — and they're different enough that it's worth understanding exactly how.
PPPoE billing: recurring subscriptions
PPPoE clients are your core subscriber base — households and businesses with a username and password tied to a router, on a recurring package (say, a monthly 10 Mbps plan). The billing model here is subscription-based: a client renews their package, gets a fixed expiry date, and either pays before it lapses or gets disconnected automatically when it does. The operational needs are:
- Package management (speed tiers, pricing, validity periods).
- Automatic expiry tracking and disconnection — no client should stay online unpaid because someone forgot to check.
- Automatic reconnection the moment a renewal payment lands.
- Invoicing and payment history a client (or the operator) can look back on.
Hotspot billing: prepaid, no account required
Hotspot vouchers serve a completely different use case: a guest who wants short-term access — an hour, a day — without creating a persistent account. The billing model is prepaid and self-contained: a voucher code is generated, sold (often via an instant M-Pesa or Kopo Kopo STK push at a captive portal), and it grants access for a fixed duration starting from first use. There's no renewal, no ongoing relationship — just a code that works until its time runs out.
The operational needs here are different too:
- Bulk voucher generation for printing and manual sale, plus self-service purchase via mobile money.
- A duration that starts counting down from activation, not from the moment the voucher was generated.
- Hard disconnection the instant time runs out — unlike a PPPoE client, there's no "grace period" conversation to have with an anonymous guest.
Why running both separately is a mistake
Plenty of ISPs end up managing PPPoE billing in one system (or a spreadsheet) and hotspot vouchers in another — sometimes literally a stack of pre-printed cards with no digital record at all. That split creates blind spots: no unified view of total revenue, no shared reporting, and two different places to check when a customer calls in confused about their connection.
The alternative is a single platform where both billing models run against the same RADIUS layer and the same MikroTik routers — subscription clients and prepaid vouchers both authenticate, get rate-limited, and get disconnected through identical infrastructure, just with different billing rules behind them. That's the model XpressRADIUS is built around: one dashboard, one revenue view, two billing models running side by side.
Run PPPoE subscriptions and prepaid hotspot vouchers from one dashboard.
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