Thank you for the information.

As a B2BUA, can I use Vovida? Anybody has successfully deployed Vovida with SER for a Prepaid scenario? Or Vovida is a bad idea?

I am having second thoughts about Asterisk B2BUA, as the resource consumption is gonna be much higher and I’m not gonna make use of all the features. All I want is just make SIP to PSTN calls and Bill them properly. Also, when it comes to scalability, Asterisk is not the best isn’t it?

Any other alternative solution compared to the above 2 solutions? Can I do something using SEMS? Or is there any recommended commercial, not so expensive B2BUA products out there? Any advise would be much appreciated ;)

From: sip [mailto:sip@arcdiv.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2007 5:08 PM
To: Shafraz Thawfeek; serusers@lists.iptel.org
Cc: serusers@iptel.org
Subject: Re: [Serusers] SER + Prepaid with Radius AAA.

You are correct. There are several workarounds for this, but for the most part, what you need is some sort of B2BUA functionality.  Essentially, the call needs to go through a UAS that DOES keep track.  The new SEMS is supposed to have some of this functionality, although I don't know much about it.  Some people use Asterisk (with Asterisk B2BUA).  We ended up writing our own Asterisk B2BUA as the Asterisk B2BUA code from sourceforge had things in it we neither wanted nor used and their patches never seem to be up to date on the later versions of Asterisk (current code out there works in a guaranteed way only for Asterisk 1.2.1, though it wasn't until after 1.2.9.1 that we had to seriously rewrite the patch). The sourceforge code works, though, for earlier versions of Asterisk, and is an excellent starting place if you've little desire to write the whole thing yourself.

The concept of using Asterisk is pretty simple:  call gets forwarded from SER to an Asterisk AGI program (C, Perl, etc) that does all the magic.  The easiest way is to do a balance check when the call comes in to determine the cost of the outgoing call and check how much time a person has left on the call based on how much money is in their account. Then, just set up an Asterisk Dial command with the appropriate timeout and let the server take care of the rest.  There are tricks to this, of course. Unless you're somehow updating call credit and call timeout on the fly, you'll need to limit the incoming calls to one at a time for each account, or it's easy for someone to call with multiple phones and rob you of cash.

N.


On Wed, 21 Mar 2007 12:27:27 +0530, Shafraz Thawfeek wrote
> Hello All,
>  
> Its really feels nice to have joined the list. I'm in the process of deploying a SER based solution for prepaid users. We're using a FreeRadius based billing solution from a provider. If I'm not mistaken, SER is not aware of the call state, what this means to me is, in case the user account on the radius runs out of credit, SER will not know about it and will not be able to disconnect the call. Am I correct on this?
>  
> If I am correct, I would like to know what would be the workaround for this? I'm I am wrong, then I would like to know on how we could get the call disconnection working?
>  
> I have a Nextone which would be sitting in front of the SER and acting as a Mirror Proxy for SER. The purpose of this is to overcome NAT traversal issues and free SER from that. Nextone doesn’t understand or talk radius. SER will be the registrar and handle AAA. The user call will be sent back into the Nextone and then terminated from there. SER will not be handling media. If to get my disconnect upon credit exhaust scenario working, what changes should I introduce into my existing network model?
>  
> Thank you.
> Shaf.
>  
>