Association is the process of associating hardware items with the booked contract. Contract and hardware association is required to activate signals on the hardware items.
Provisioning attribute wise hardware items are associated to the respective contract and the association details are sent for provisioning.
Hardware item-contract association may happen implicitly if one set of smart card or/and decoder already exist with the customer before booking order incase of single room contract. Incase of multi-room contract where multiple hardware items exist with the customer, the association can also happen implicitly.
When a contract is renewed, the existing association details are copied with the new order. Similarly, on reconnection the existing association will not be changed. Only provisioning requests are setup. But in case of hardware return, the existing association is marked as canceled.
When an association is modified, the existing association is marked as canceled. In such case, Disconnection provisioning requests is sent to cancel the old association and activation provisioning request is sent to activate the new association.
Association of hardware is done through Association screen.