Patent ID: 7215942

Claim:
A communications system, having a prepaid architecture for managing a plurality of prepaid wireless accounts for communication services, wherein each prepaid account is associated with a prepaid subscriber, comprising: a wireless network including a mobile switch, in communication with a wireless device, the wireless device for remotely managing at least one of the prepaid accounts; a wide area network including: a prepaid account database for storing records assigned to subscribers of prepaid communications service; a prepaid application module for initializing and updating the prepaid accounts, for determining a current account balance while the prepaid communications service is in use by a subscriber, for comparing the current account balance to a recharge threshold, and for generating alerts once the current account balance falls below the recharge threshold while the prepaid communications service is in use and wherein the prepaid application module decreases an amount of time from one alert to a subsequent alert as the current account balance continues to fall during use of the prepaid communications service; a credit card transaction server, coupled to a credit card database, for checking available credit; a prepaid server coupled to the prepaid account database and the prepaid application module; and a gateway in communication with the mobile switch of the wireless network and in communication with the wide area network to deliver the alerts to the wireless devices, wherein the gateway is selected from the group consisting of a push proxy and a WAP push proxy.