[Asterisk-Users] Call Rate in CDR

[Paul Crick]

> I personally think the "right" place to deal with billing
> is in your billing application.  Your billing application
> should know about special rates for different customers,
> time of day rates, destination rates, etc. There is already
> enough information in the CDR to know which provider you are
> going thru.  i.e. fields 6 and 8 in the CDR logs.

I have to agree with Eric here. If you have flat per minute rates, great,
store them in the CDR table. But for advanced and/or complex billing
solutions, I'm not convinced it's the right place. Just as Eric said,
they're call detail records, not call costing records.

What's "advanced" or "complex"? Hmm.. how about per call fees with a
minutely rate on top? 39c connection then 3c/min (can anyone say
10-10-987?). Or minutely rates that change based on either call duration or
time of day?

A call starts at 17:50 and lasts 15 mins. The first 10 are charged at
"daytime" rate, the last 5 at "evening" rate.

Maybe we're moving away from this, to fixed per minute rates 24/7. Or maybe
these are ways to differentiate your product offering from the competition?
(The majority of Europe can't be wrong?) ;-)

Take the example of Virgin Mobile in the UK where the first 5 minutes of
calls every day are charged at 15p/minute, but all calls after that are
5p/minute. Is it right to store the effective rate in a call detail record?
Hmm.. I'm not convinced..

The bottom line for me is reproducability. Given a call destination +
duration you should always be able to re-rate that call and come to the same
"cost" value.