[asterisk-dev] Passing AOC information across channels

[Koopmann, Jan-Peter]

On Monday, January 30, 2006 1:46 PM Olle E Johansson wrote:

> To get the discussion going, please tell us what AOC is and what you
> want to do. Don't assume that everyone on the mailing list is aware
> of the old discussions...  

I am terribly sorry I simply assumed everybody would know about AOC or the ongoing requests in the asterisk mailing list. I am talking about "Advice of Charge" which is used heavily at least in German ISDN but from other postings I gather that other countries are using it as well. There seem to be three types of AOC:

AOC-S: Advice of Charge at call set-up time
AOC-E: Advice of Charge at the end of the call
AOC-D: Advice of Charge during the call 

Several ISDN APIs incl. bristuff zaptel are able to extract at least AOC-E information for the ISDN channel. Unfortunatly there still seem to be at least two problems:

1. How can we get the AOC information in CDR fields (custom fields will be fine)? I learned how to put information in a custom CDR field but how can one get the AOC-E information into the dial-plan? Even if there is a way, this would have to be done after a successful dial which is dirty to say the least. Is this not something that should rather be done automatically and therefore in the channel driver? 

2. AOC information should survive channel hops. E.g. if you have ISDN <-> IAX <-> ISDN, the AOC information coming in on the first ISDN should be sent to the outgoing ISDN as well. A new AST_CONTROL frame might be a solution to this but I am far from understanding the consequences.


A lot of companies are depending on the AOC information for their own internal bookkeeping, project analysis, charging it to customers etc. So if a company depends on AOC information being available at the moment, Asterisk unfortunatly is not an option. Since the AOC information is already extracted from the ISDN D-channel by the channel drivers, it should not be too hard to implement the two wishes, should it?

Mattf suggested in http://bugs.digium.com/view.php?id=6152 that it would be "nice" to implement this in Asterisk, especially if there are AOC/SIP implementations out there as well. He also was the one suggesting to move the discussion to the -dev mailing list. Unfortunatly I have not heard from him since and do not know how to contact him best.


Kind regards,
  Jan-Peter