[Asterisk-biz] Call termination database

[alex at pilosoft.com]

On Thu, 17 Feb 2005, Kevin P. Fleming wrote:

> > like to see? In particular, how detailed would you like locations to be? 
> > Countries? Regions / States? Individual area codes?
> 
> I have been considering building a "route only" database, to also be 
> publicly available. This would serve two purposes: it would be a 
> canonical (hopefully accurate) list of routes (country, city/region, 
> route type), and would also provide a template to be used for an A-Z 
> termination provider to provide their rates. If the site allowed the 
> route database (or portions thereof) to be downloaded as CSV/SXC/XLS, 
> then I could provide the database to a potential termination provider, 
> have them fill in the numbers (or they could provide me their 
> already-filled-in template they have on file) and then it would be easy 
> to merge the numbers in my company's routing database.
> 
> As it stands now, pretty much every provider has their own "rate chart" 
> format, and many of them are incomplete and/or inaccurate. I wasn't 
> really thinking about actually building a _rate_ database, since the 
> rates are frequently not public, based on volume, etc.
Here's how it *really* works.

Telcordia LERG contains the real routing information. For a given NPA-NXX,
it maps into LATA and into OCN. Now, carriers group OCNs into "tiers"  
(just groups of carriers with similar rates).  Usually Tier 1 is RBOC,
Tier 6 is NECA, and those tiers are uniform across all termination
providers. All other "tiers" are subject to individual carrier's
termination agreements, and they can be "CLEC", "Cellular", "RBOC
Cellular" etc. Those OCN-Tier mappings are somewhat individual among 
carriers who sell termination.

LERG costs 3000$ for a copy, and something like 500$ for monthly updates. 
You can look up LERG info at www.telcodata.us for free, but you can't get 
free access to LERG. Also, I have a feeling that Telcordia won't look too 
kindly at freely downloadable LERG-extracted information, but I need to 
check LERG licensing to be sure.

If you want to let termination providers list their rates, you can either
allow them to spit out their entire NPA/NXX->rate map (huge), or two maps:  
OCN -> tier, and lata+OCN -> rate

> I'd like to discuss this further; I have equipment that I could host 
> this with, and would be happy to do so (again, as Alistair said, it's 
> good advertising plus we'd be giving back to the community).
> 
> If this is off-topic for this mailing list, email me directly and we'll 
> try to get something figured out.
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