FreeRADIUS CoA lets an ISP change the policy of an online subscriber without waiting for the subscriber to disconnect and reconnect. For prepaid broadband operations, CoA is useful for renewals, speed upgrades, FUP throttling, and forced disconnects.
CoA connects billing events to live sessions
When a subscriber pays, changes plan, crosses FUP, or gets suspended, the billing platform can send a Change of Authorization or disconnect request to the NAS. The NAS then updates the live session according to the new policy.
Use CoA for payment restoration
If an expired subscriber pays while still connected in a restricted state, CoA can restore the correct speed immediately. Without CoA, the subscriber may need to reconnect before the new plan applies.
Use CoA carefully for disconnects
Forced disconnects should be logged with the reason, subscriber, NAS, operator, and billing state. This keeps support teams from guessing why a customer went offline.
Monitor failures by NAS
CoA failures can happen because of wrong NAS IPs, shared secrets, firewall rules, unsupported devices, or stale sessions. A good platform should expose these failures instead of hiding them in logs.
NowaCRM links billing status, plan policy, FreeRADIUS, MikroTik workflows, online sessions, and CoA actions so live network behavior follows subscriber state.