Prepaid is very simple task. User must put some money in his account. User selects target. You calculate how long could be the call, and you dial target.
At the end of call - you calculate call, and you take money from user.
Complications - recharging account. There are lot of problems there, mainly with security.
If you would like to allow your users to make more then 1 simultaneous call.
There are couple of things, you should decide:
1. If you plane to offer some specific solution - then you should select opensource project, or you even should start from scratch.
2. You can look for problems with different solutions on market.
"How I can choose the right solution" - mission impossible - in all cases you will see later that there is may be some better solutions.
Best you can do is to select more or less good solution which will do job you need.
Commercial products, in theory have better support. But they rely on provider.
As you see with Kamailio - free products can rely on provider and community, and you can get paid support, you also can easily (more or less) switch supporter.
There are hosting solutions also, but I have no experience with them at all.
My main experience is with freelance support for Asterisk through ssh, and this is why I cant help with freeswitch. Best advantage of Asterisk (except I know it better) is it allows any language for AGI scripts, and with them you can do everything.
I prefer Freeswitch, but I know that Asterisk can do prepaid and
there are different prepaid solutions.
Anyway, as the prepaid server is a mission-critical component, I
would like to have your (and the community) opinion about the
preferred architecture and experiences about opensource/commercial
solution (advantages and drawbacks).
All the billing solution are good enough for a service provider
environment? How I can choose the right solution if all vendors say
that their solution is the best one? :)
Regards,
Il 05/01/12 13.18, Stoyan Mihaylov ha scritto:
I can suggest using Asterisk for prepaid job.
I mean you can use Kamailio and couple of Asterisk servers
behind it to do prepaid. There are lot of prepaid solutions for
Asterisk. But again, if I have to do it I will prefer my
solution, or using parts from what is available.
I'm working in a project for a service provider in
which prepaid is an essential requirement. They have
about 12000 subscribers.
The core infrastructure will be Kamailio+RTPProxy
while I have some doubts about the prepaid feature.
I'm thinking about a B2BUA (SEMS or Freeswitch) that
is called if the user belong to a "prepaid group" and
perform authorization and accounting; in this case the
SIP flow could be: Kamailio -> B2BUA(Prepaid) ->
Kamailio. Is a good choice?
At the moment I cannot estimate the effort needed to
develop this section (base prepaid feature) of the
project... Do you have some hints?
What are the prepaid solution implemented by you? Do
you use your own developed solution or do you think
that is better to choose a commercial solution (that
provide also calling-card and other features)?
I have seen some commercial products (Portabilling,
Jerasoft/Bilberry, ...); what do you think about?