A method for billing consumers of on-demand commodities consumed at
a site remote from the site at which they are produced. It is modeled after certain contemporary telephone-company billing practices, though it is not limited to use with telephone companies. In one embodiment the method uses a telephone
service provider to bill and collect for monies owed to the producer of the commodity for the amount of the full commodity units consumed during a billing period. In a simple embodiment of the method, commodity-consumption information is sent to the billing service by an automatically reading meter located at the point where the commodity is delivered for consumption. In particular, this commodity meter-such as an
electric power meter-is designed to generate a discrete
signal each time that a predetermined commodity-billing-unit has been consumed. Further in this particular embodiment, a
coupling device for
coupling the meter to the
telephone line of the
consumer is designed to receive this discrete
signal and, each time that it does, to call a predetermined
telephone number. The
coupling device then disconnects the telephone connection immediately upon receiving
verification of a telephone connection, without the transfer of any data. In that manner, the billing facility at the telephone is able to
record that the particular customer identified by the number from which the call came had consumed one more billing-cost-unit of the commodity. This information is then utilized by the accounting computer at the telephone company to generate a
line item or a billing section on the next telephone bill sent to that particular customer, a
line item or a billing section corresponding to the cost of the commodity in question consumed by that customer during the billing period.