Methods for providing overdraft protection for post-paid communication service plans

摘要

Methods for adding minutes to a calling plan having a calling plan period. The methods including determining whether a threshold number of minutes have been reached during the calling plan period; and incrementally adding minutes to the calling plan when the threshold number of minutes has been reached. The cost per minute of the added minutes is less than the high-cost per minute rate normally associated with exceeding the threshold number of minutes during the calling plan period.

主权项

1. A system comprising:
a processor; and a computer-readable storage device comprising instructions that, when executed by the processor, cause the processor to perform operations comprising:
determining whether a communications account of a user is associated with an overdraft-protection plan,providing, in response to determining that the communications account is associated with the overdraft-protection plan, a user-inquiry message to determine whether the user would like to borrow additional data blocks from a future data plan period or be charged a predetermined cost per additional data block for the additional data blocks, andreceiving, following providing the user-inquiry message, a user instruction to add data blocks to a present data plan period of the communications account by a mechanism selected from a group consisting of:
borrowing the additional data blocks from the future data plan period, andcharging the predetermined cost per additional data block for the additional data blocks.