[Asterisk-Dev] H.323 Gateway/Gatekeeper - Radius AAA

[Jeremy McNamara]

Patrick wrote:

>You have been saying that Radius for billing purposes sucks on #asterisk
>and now here. Surprisingly if you google around for billing solutions
>you will find many software solutions that use Radius. Back in 2001 I
>worked on the billing system at WorldCom and UUNet which generates
>billions of CDRs a month. 
>
If Worldcom and UUNet jumped off a bridge would you?

>It would be way more useful to people if you could explain *why* in your
>opinion Radius is not suitable for billing purposes. 
>

I have been over and over and over this...  RADIUS adds another layer of 
failure to your network, lots of overhead, and unnecessary complication.

Think VHS and Beta...  Beta is a superior technology but VHS was 
successfully marketed.   Since RADIUS seemed to work for dial up 'they' 
assumed it is natural for VoIP, well they are very wrong.  

Try doing pre-paid calling cards with Cisco's RADIUS implementation... I 
dare you.  

Why in hell do you think everyone is always looking for a billing 
system?  I have personally talked to dozens of ppl that have spent major 
money on SysMaster (and the like) and they absolutely hate it.  Why?  
because it is a kludge... It is dramaticly overcomplicated and at the 
end of the day it doesn't really do what they need.


>And while you are at it, please take a minute to share what you think is the right
>approach to a billing solution for Asterisk. After all, you have already
>integrated a billing solution into Asterisk that afaik you can not share
>due to resistance of the "suits".
>  
>

CDR backend, Rating Engine and MySQL. 

I've personally chosen not to share my billing system. First off, my 
billing code will never see the light of day, so that means a non-gpl 
license you would have to get from Digium and at this point my operation 
is not far enough along to support both termination customers and 
customers running our billing system.



Jeremy McNamara