Prepaid billing solution for a service provider - sr-users

Stoyan Mihaylov

5 Jan 5 Jan

7:18 a.m.

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. PS We did prepaid things for Asterisk. On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 1:08 PM, Carlo Dimaggio <jaasmailing(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:

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Hi all, 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? Best Regards, _______________________________________________ SIP Express Router (SER) and Kamailio (OpenSER) - sr-users mailing list sr-users(a)lists.sip-router.org http://lists.sip-router.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sr-users

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Stoyan Mihaylov

9:02 a.m.

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. On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 3:42 PM, Carlo Dimaggio <jaasmailing(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:

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Hi Stoyan, 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. PS We did prepaid things for Asterisk. On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 1:08 PM, Carlo Dimaggio <jaasmailing(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:

Hi all, 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? Best Regards, _______________________________________________ SIP Express Router (SER) and Kamailio (OpenSER) - sr-users mailing list sr-users(a)lists.sip-router.org http://lists.sip-router.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sr-users

_______________________________________________ SIP Express Router (SER) and Kamailio (OpenSER) - sr-users mailing listsr-users@lists.sip-router.orghttp://lists.sip-router.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sr-users _______________________________________________ SIP Express Router (SER) and Kamailio (OpenSER) - sr-users mailing list sr-users(a)lists.sip-router.org http://lists.sip-router.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sr-users

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Stefan Sayer

5:38 a.m.

For completeness (as it has been mentioned in this thread): SEMS SBC's pendant to dialog module API is the "SBC call control" API; if you want to use a B2BUA (e.g. to enforce SST), briefly documented here: http://git.sip-router.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=sems;a=blob;f=doc/Readme.sbc… Stefan o Daniel-Constantin Mierla on 01/06/2012 11:17 AM:

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Just to add here the option of using kamailio's dialog module to implement prepaid systems. It will be at signaling level (so no ivr/media capabilities), which can fit very well in many scenarios. If it is the case of 1 call per user at a time, then practically can be done from kamailio config only. When call starts, compute the max duration for that call based on caller/destination (e.g., call a stored procedure via sqlops) and set the dialog timeout to that duration. When call ends (BYE in main route or timeout route) update the credit accordingly. For many simultaneous calls, you can write a small module that uses the dialog API, to update the timeout of ongoing calls based on the costs for new calls. Also, dialog module can be used as a controller of the signaling, being handled by an external billing engine. When a call starts, inform the billing engine about it. When there is no more credit, the billing engine can send MI/RPC command (e.g., via xmlrpc) to end the call. Cheers, Daniel On 1/5/12 3:02 PM, Stoyan Mihaylov wrote:

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. On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 3:42 PM, Carlo Dimaggio <jaasmailing(a)gmail.com <mailto:jaasmailing@gmail.com>> wrote: Hi Stoyan, 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. PS We did prepaid things for Asterisk. On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 1:08 PM, Carlo Dimaggio <jaasmailing(a)gmail.com <mailto:jaasmailing@gmail.com>> wrote: Hi all, 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? Best Regards, _______________________________________________ SIP Express Router (SER) and Kamailio (OpenSER) - sr-users mailing list sr-users(a)lists.sip-router.org <mailto:sr-users@lists.sip-router.org> http://lists.sip-router.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sr-users _______________________________________________ SIP Express Router (SER) and Kamailio (OpenSER) - sr-users mailing list sr-users(a)lists.sip-router.org <mailto:sr-users@lists.sip-router.org> http://lists.sip-router.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sr-users

_______________________________________________ SIP Express Router (SER) and Kamailio (OpenSER) - sr-users mailing list sr-users(a)lists.sip-router.org <mailto:sr-users@lists.sip-router.org> http://lists.sip-router.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sr-users _______________________________________________ SIP Express Router (SER) and Kamailio (OpenSER) - sr-users mailing list sr-users(a)lists.sip-router.org http://lists.sip-router.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sr-users

-- Daniel-Constantin Mierla --http://www.asipto.com http://linkedin.com/in/miconda -- http://twitter.com/miconda _______________________________________________ SIP Express Router (SER) and Kamailio (OpenSER) - sr-users mailing list sr-users(a)lists.sip-router.org http://lists.sip-router.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sr-users

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Stefan Sayer

11:53 a.m.

Hello, o Carlo Dimaggio on 01/05/2012 12:08 PM:

...

Hi all, 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?

we (FRAFOS) have implemented prepaid on top of SEMS SBC (and are offering that commercially, complete with replication and all, contact me if you are interested; I won't go into details here as it's not open source). Some thoughts, experiences and things to consider: - if you want to do prepaid properly, you need to be call stateful, be it proxy or b2bua; using a b2bua simplifies things IMO - if you want to permit parallel calls, you can either make a time slice based system, or you need to have a central active calls registry - a time slice based system may put heavy load on your accounting server/DB, which may be prohibitively high for high concurrent call numbers - for high availability, you need replication not only for the call control (if you use B2BUA), but also for the registry of running calls, if any - calculating timers for parallel calls with things like free minutes, on-/off-peak etc. is not trivial (but possible) The subscriber base in question doesn't sound so big (12k), so a simple solution may be working well. Regards Stefan

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