[Asterisk-Users] Rodopi Billing

[Greg Boehnlein]

On Wed, 4 Aug 2004, Jeremy McNamara wrote:

> Greg Boehnlein wrote:
> 
> > We use Platypus from Boardtown, which was just acquired by Tucows. 
> > Although it has it's quirks, having seen Rodopi, Emerald, Prism and 
> > ISPEasy in action, I'll take Platypus ANY day!
> > 
> > I have a method for hacking VoIP per minute billing into Platypus, but I 
> > haven't executed it yet. Basically, we dump all of our CDR records to a 
> > database. On a daily basis, we can tally up the the per-minute LD totals 
> > for each customer and then insert a Radius Start/Stop record w/ the total 
> > billing seconds for that day. Platypus's built in rate tables take care of 
> > the rest. We provide 1,000 minutes of long distance with each account, so 
> > at the end of the month when Platypus tallies up it's overage charges, if 
> > the usage exceeds the limit, it bills the customer accordingly.
> > 
> 
> If that customer is still around to pay you.
>  
> Billing for services such as VoIP should be in real-time, anything less 
> is unacceptable in my book.

Perhaps, but most services that are usage based are billed in arrears. Not 
everyone has a setup like NuFone, where people deposit money in advance 
and you can just debit the calls against their account. You are a little 
unique in that arena.

Try getting someone that spends $50,000 a year in Long Distance to put 
most of it up front. If you can make that happen, god bless you, but most 
of corporate America has been trained by 100+ years of telephone history 
to pay their LD at the end of the month.

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