Telecommunications apparatus

摘要

Telecommunications apparatus such as a telephone is provided with a data acquisition application which acts as a data acquisition means. This records data concerned with the use made by the apparatus of the communication network to which it is connected. The data is transmitted to a billing server and use to generate a bill to the user. The present invention ensures that the data concerning a call connection may be acquired and provided to the billing system even though a central node does not control a call connection, i.e. in protocols such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) operating on a peer-to-peer network topology wherein connections are not established by a central node and thus information concerning the connection is not available for the billing or accounting systems.