[Serusers] Call Forward Billing

[Jiri Kuthan]

agreed -- the SER part is relatively easy, correlation, reconcilliation, robustness, anomaly
detection, and so on, that's the most complex piece, all of it located in the CDR
postprocessing tool. In our own experience, it takes some learning phase to figure
out what all can go wroing with CDRs to achieve desirable robustness.

For SER, the challenge is IMO to keep things straigtforward. Having configured SER to user
an AVP to state the party to be charged (ideally by UID) (or by a flag pointing either at
a caller/callee) + an AVP stating the 'class-of-call' as outlined bellow is certainly
feasible.

-jiri


At 08:18 11/07/2006, Greger V. Teigre wrote:
>Just to expand on "special-casing": Getting user actions into $ can be very tricky and is very dependent on your billing system. I.e. the capabilities of the type of invoice records that can be created (and manipulated; rating, VAT, no VAT, customer discounts, volume discounts, time of day etc etc). You normally have to start there and trace back: What should the normalized CDRs look like for the billing system to import and rate them correctly. Then you step backwards again: Your accounting records (start/stop), what should they look like. The tool taking start/stop records must be capable of interpreting the records and create normalized CDRs.  If you gather accounting records from multiple sources (PSTN GWs, routers etc), it may make sense to consolidate the record collection and normalization (i.e. adapt your accounting records to be similar across sources so you simplify the normalization)-
>    Puh! This leads us to Jiri's comment: Once you know what you need, you can use additional AVPs/flags in acc table.  
>g-)
>PS! In the PSTN world, the forwarding party/C-number is often added in a third column in the records and one set of start/stop will exist for each call leg. If present, the C-number will be used for charging.
>
>Jiri Kuthan wrote: 
>>
>>It is a configuration thing.
>>
>>It appears a misconception to me to build special-casing in SER.
>>acc module can store additional AVPs or flags in acc table. These
>>can indicate reverse charging at your convenience, to be processed
>>by your favorite CDR postprocesssing tool.
>>
>>Moreover, if done well, all the authentication-authorization-accounting
>>process can be, if configured properly, brought to the same least
>>common denominator, which is AVP -- you authenticate someone, check
>>if his ACLs expressed as an AVP permit a call (e.g., 'international'), 
>>account it (possibly with additional AVPs/flags providing additional
>>hints for how to interpret the CDR).
>>
>>-jiri
>>
>>At 19:49 10/07/2006, Rosa De Santis wrote:
>>
>>
>>  
>>>
>>>Thanks for your answer.
>>>And this functionality is not present in SER ?
>>>
>>>Rosa.
>>>
>>>
>>>-----------------------------------------------
>>>    
>>>>
>>>>Date: Sat, 8 Jul 2006 00:20:44 -0700
>>>>From: <mailto:t_maron_lists at yahoo.com>t_maron_lists at yahoo.com
>>>>Subject: Re: [Serusers] Call Forward Billing
>>>>To: <mailto:rosadesantis at hotmail.com>rosadesantis at hotmail.com
>>>>
>>>>If you are locked by this, you can import a patch from openser, they have it for some time, see:
>>>><http://openser.org/docs/modules/1.1.x/acc.html#MULTI-CALL-LEGS>http://openser.org/docs/modules/1.1.x/acc.html#MULTI-CALL-LEGS
>>>>T.
>>>>On 07/07/06 18:46, Rosa De Santis wrote:
>>>>Hello all.
>>>>Please, can somebody help about changing the billing when making call forward ?
>>>>I'm trying to change the billed user when A calls B, B forwards to C (C is PSTN). I want to charge the call to B. I'm using Ser+Asterisk B2BUA.
>>>>Any idea, please?
>>>>Thanks
>>>>Rosa.
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>>--
>>Jiri Kuthan            <http://iptel.org/~jiri/>http://iptel.org/~jiri/  
>>
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>
>--
>Jiri Kuthan            http://iptel.org/~jiri/