[SR-Users] Prepaid billing solution for a service provider

[Stoyan Mihaylov]

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 at 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 at 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,
>>
>>
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>>
>
>
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