[asterisk-biz] Experimental/new VoIP rate search engine.

[Alex Balashov]

Yeah, I understand.  It's easy for me to preach the importance of simply 
finding the problem and fixing it, but these problems are often 
impossibly burdensome to track down and fix, to the extent it's even 
feasible to do so.

I'd just drop the carrier if I were you.

1. Do you have this problem with other carriers?   To the same degree?

2. What happens when you do proxy the media and use that as your 
accounting basis;  does your billing reconcile with this carrier almost 
perfectly?

3. Any correlation on the itemised portion/CDRs on the bill between 
particular numbers and/or destinations and eccentrically long calls?

-- Alex

Nitzan Kon wrote:

> I totally agree with you in principal, but the problem is that
> the issue is not on our side. It is on the carrier side. I'm
> making an assumption here, but if out of many carriers we use
> only one displays these symptoms then something is wrong with
> THEIR system - not ours.
> 
> In other words - I can't fix it nor find out what is wrong, 
> because nothing is wrong on our side. I suspect it's related
> to them not proxying the calls - but I could be wrong. When
> I complained I was told "your server probably didn't send a
> SIP BYE" which may or may not be true, but even if it is true
> I think the idea that a crashed server or lost packets on the
> client side would cause a call to continue forever or until a 
> pre-set max timeout is ridiculous on a carrier level. They
> MUST account for such situations.
> 
> To make things worse- the fact that the carrier is making
> quite a bit of extra profit from this bug gives them zero
> incentive to fix it and all the incentive in the world to
> blame it on our server, our users' CPE, or the weather. It's
> not THEIR $$$ at stake so they don't give a crap.
> 
> Of course, it *IS* their $$$ at stake when they lose our
> business - but that's a whole different story...
> 
> --- On Mon, 1/5/09, Alex Balashov <abalashov at evaristesys.com> wrote:
> 
>> Most of my response to this has already been captured in
>> some form by Kristian and Ken, but just to sum up:
>>
>> 1. I didn't say that these types of signaling errata
>> don't occur.  They do.  They should be treated as a cost
>> of doing business.  If they account for a nontrivial
>> percentage of lost revenue, you've got a more
>> fundamental problem of a technical nature somewhere and need
>> to fix the problem at the source.
>>
>> The lost money should be utterly trivial in comparison to
>> the amount of money you would need to spend to handle all
>> media from customers in a way that is reliable, scalable and
>> reasonably mitigates QoS issues. Scalability is probably the
>> biggest cost, even though it is not visible as an immediate,
>> short-term cash outflow.
>>
>> As with most other things in business, it needs to be
>> Pareto-optimal.
>>
>> 2. As Ken alluded, if you have a nontrivial amount of such
>> occurrences, there is most likely a technical problem
>> somewhere.  You, your vendors, or your suppliers are doing
>> something wrong.
>>
>> SIP signaling is not inherently flawed in its relationship
>> to accounting, or exceptionally unreliable compared to other
>> signaling technologies where the transport and switching
>> assembly entails a separate signaling and bearer plane.  SIP
>> does have reliable retransmission of initial and sequential
>> requests as well as final replies, and they do work--if
>> you're losing more than an infinitesimal fraction of
>> them, you've got a network or equipment problem in the
>> path.  CPE disappearing due to shoddy power or connectivity
>> can be mitigated through the use of session timers, as
>> Kristian suggested.
>>
>> You need to figure out what the problem is.
>>
>> At the root of this, what I'm advocating is not a
>> reckless disregard for cost control or billing discrepancies
>> as much as it is a lean, fundamentals-based, back-to-basics,
>> no-nonsense technical and backoffice process strategy.
>>
>> By the way, 179811 - 130740 is a difference of 49071.  249
>> / 49071 is an average per-minute rate of half a penny
>> ($.005), so let's say for assumption's sake that the
>> rest of your traffic (the 130k minutes) consists of
>> $.005/min flat.  That's $650, which means your overage
>> is 38% of the rest of your gross.  If you have that kind of
>> billing errata, you've got far, far more fundamental
>> issues per million than random CDR slips due to missing
>> signaling in normal operating conditions should produce. 
>> While nobody knows what that exposure figure is, it
>> shouldn't be ~25% of your bill!
>>
>> I've successfully set up SIP-only usage accounting for
>> an operation that does over 3 million minutes a month, and
>> their discrepancies with their upstream carriers (yes, they
>> use SIP trunks) average an error margin of maybe 1.2%.  Now,
>> this is a viciously thin-margin space, so really, 1.2% is
>> too high and I'm trying to get that corrected for them. 
>> I should follow my own advice.
>>
>> -- Alex
>>
>> Nitzan Kon wrote:
>>
>>> --- On Sun, 1/4/09, Alex Balashov
>> <abalashov at evaristesys.com> wrote:
>>>> Many of them have claimed they lose a ton of money
>> from accounting problems caused by the unreliability of
>> signaling (as though SIP doesn't have reliable
>> retransmission of transactional messages or something) but
>> they've never shown me any numbers to substantiate that.
>>> OK, here's some statistics for the month of
>> December for
>>> the carrier in question:
>>>
>>> Our record shows:
>>> 100,504 calls
>>> 130,740:27 minutes total
>>>
>>> Their record shows:
>>> 100,161 calls (probably just time difference here
>>> 179,811.28 minutes total
>>>
>>> Their record shows total rate charged $229 higher than
>> what
>>> our billing system determined we SHOULD have been
>> charged.
>>> In other words- $229 extra have been charged due to
>> signaling
>>> problems - and this is just one month.
>>>
>>> I used to ask them for refunds for these but to be
>> honest it's
>>> such a PITA that I just gave up and started routing
>> most of
>>> our traffic to other carriers.
>>>
>>> Bad billing is bad for business no matter how great
>> your
>>> call quality is. :)
>>>
>>> -- Nitzan
>>> http://www.comparevoipproviderrates.com/
>>>
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>>
>> -- Alex Balashov
>> Evariste Systems
>> Web    : http://www.evaristesys.com/
>> Tel    : (+1) (678) 954-0670
>> Direct : (+1) (678) 954-0671
>> Mobile : (+1) (678) 237-1775
> 
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-- 
Alex Balashov
Evariste Systems
Web    : http://www.evaristesys.com/
Tel    : (+1) (678) 954-0670
Direct : (+1) (678) 954-0671
Mobile : (+1) (678) 237-1775