[Asterisk-biz] Call termination database

[William Waites]

On Fri, Feb 18, 2005 at 10:57:30AM +0000, Alistair Cunningham wrote:
> Linus,
> 
> I already have a field in the database for country. Location would be 
> useful - I'll add it. Thanks.

A few thoughts:

Useful fields for the route itself in addition to the destination:

	protocol (of course)
	supported CODEC(s)
	available channels
	billing type (1/1,6/30,60/60)
	advertised ASR.

If you haven't seen this, some ideas http://www.voipexchange.ru can
doubtlessly be used. Indeed the H.323/G.729/G.723 world has had such
things for such time. It would be very nice to have such a thing that
didn't cater to obsolescent technology and patent cartels ;) Of course
their service is not simply informational, they operate a brokerage 
and mediate both the signalling traffic and the flow of money between
their clients...

Another thing that would be useful "just because" would be a simple
downloadable table containing, with as much detail as possible, number
prefixes and descriptions. I have my own such table that I have collated
from various places for use in the billing part of my LCR implementation,
and I'm sure that others have done similar things. This is farily static
data, and it makes sense for it to be pooled publicly. It would be nice
to have the description field available in multiple languages as well...

There would be an economic side effect of publishing the rate data
in multiple currencies. Right now with the majority of termination
services denominated in USD, I haven't seen much correction for the
devaluation of that currency that has been happening. Effectively phone
service has been becomming cheaper as the American dollar crashes. If
termination were denominated in Euros, for example, prices of service
might be more stable in real terms, though they would be rising in
American terms...

So having an exchange that supported localized currencies might have
the effect of more tightly coupling the currency markets to the 
wholesale VoIP markets. Is this a good thing? I don't know. Certainly
interesting...

-w
-- 
William Waites, Consulting Technologist
Consultants Ars Informatica S.A.R.F.
ww at groovy.net / +1 416 848 1527 x514
                +1 514 963 4096 (Direct)