[Serusers] Session-Timers for Prepaid

[Iqbal]

I think the main reason prepaid exists in voip, is that there is very
little control on who ur customer is, or where they are, hence
collecting money from someone who has bought an account online is very
hard.

Obviously if you dont sell online and sell to ur broadband customers etc,
prepaid is not an issue u just bill them after the fact.

However the problem for a supplier is that upstream gateways all want
prepaid,and unless this changes it is very hard for a provider to offer
postpaid since cashflow just does not add up.

Also the voip business is really full of dodgy characters who run off
with the money, hence postpaid again is hard...but as Jan said it is the
way to go. Corporates will not prepay, they would prefer postpaid, even
residential like to be billed afterwards, hence what needs to happen is
that u need to limit the sales to a local community which can be
controlled as opposed for going for worldwide domaination.

Ser and prepaid, I think its hard to have a tigh 100% solution for
prepaid, just because SER is not designed as a B2BUA, which asterisk has
included, but if u look at the additional cost incurred to scale upto
10000 users, in terms of bandwidth and hardware, and apportion some of
that cost to lost billing minutes, u'll find ser a much better option.
After all most of the features asterisk has are not going to be used by
the majority of your customers, unless of course u target the corporate
PBX market.

For prepay and SER what u need is to know the time, and then send
disconnect.The time u can do a basic systems from acc, unmatched
INVITES, session-timers etc etc, the disconnect use sipsak..however the
latter I just cannot get to work well. I think ser could use a tighter
module which would disconnect.

Iqbal

On 7/8/2005, "Bruno Lopes F. Cabral" <bruno at openline.com.br> wrote:

>Hello
>
>I'm sorry but what you said could be true for
>first world but we from third world and other
>not developed countries will use pre-paid and
>pay-per-minute for years to come.
>
>This is a major drawback to widespread usage
>of SER instead of asterisk, and you could
>notice that by the number of ppl who asks in
>this list for pre-paid and charge-by-minute
>solutions to SER.
>
>just my $0.02, no flame war intended.
>
>Cheers
>!3runo
>from Brazil
>
>'Jan Janak' wrote:
>>   In my opinion there is no way prepaid calling can survive in long
>>   term. Prices of PSTN calls will keep falling, more and more calls will
>>   be pure IP and the rest will be covered by flat rate monthly fees. It's
>>   happening now and it will be more and more common in the future.
>
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