Understanding your usage
Telecom usage reads more easily with a few distinctions: what rang, what was spoken, what is billable. Amounts depend on your contract and are shown as “According to your contract”.
Updated on
Inbound and outbound minutes
An inbound call arrives on one of your numbers. An outbound call leaves your account for a recipient. The two are counted separately, because their conditions differ by country and number type.
Ringing, conversation and billable duration
Three durations exist on the same call and they are not interchangeable.
| Term | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Ringing | From the start of the call until it is answered, or abandoned. |
| Conversation | From answer to the end of the call. |
| Billable duration | The duration your contract uses, with its rounding rules. It can differ from the conversation. |
Call legs
When TELQIO connects two people, it sets up two links: one to each party. These are call legs. A call of this kind can therefore produce several usage lines, one per leg, depending on your contract. A transfer adds more.
SMS segments and encoding
A long SMS is split into segments and each segment is counted. The encoding decides how large a segment is. GSM-7 covers a limited character set and allows longer segments. UCS-2 applies as soon as a character outside GSM-7 appears (some accented letters, emoji) and shortens each segment.
A slightly edited text can therefore move from one segment to two. The API returns the estimated number of segments and the encoding when you send.
Provisional data and reconciliation
Recent usage can be provisional: the provisional flag is then true. Corrections arrive as new events, never by overwriting history. Statements are reconciled with provider data, and a gap raises an alert for review.
curl "https://api.example.test/v1/usage?from=2026-10-01&to=2026-10-31&group_by=service" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer tq_test_EXEMPLE"Group to understand
You can group by day, number, project, country or service. Start with the project to see who is using what, then by country to explain a difference.
Frequently asked questions
Why two lines for a single call?
Because a call that connects two parties has two legs. Each can produce a usage line.