[Asterisk-Users] Rate file formats: a standard?

[John Todd]

[crossposted to isp-clec and asterisk-users]

As part of several larger projects, the question of rate importation 
from termination carriers has come up.  If a firm has four different 
LD partners, as an example, then it is obvious that the firm needs to 
determine at the origination of a call where that call would be best 
sent on a cost basis.  I'll ignore things like quality of service and 
other metrics for the moment, and stick only to monetary costs. 
Least Cost Routing is not terribly difficult, but what I have noticed 
is the lack of standardization as to how I would populate an LCR 
system on anything even remotely approaching "automatically".  I get 
Excel spreadsheets via email, text files off the web, badly formatted 
RTF, faxes, snail mail, everything except for cuneiform - though I 
expect my first clay tablets in interoffice mail any day now.  As an 
IP-centric person and someone who has been exposed to using data 
networks as a transport mechanism, it seems odd to me that an 
RFC-like document describing rate table formats has not come across 
my searches to this point.  So...

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The question is: Is there a standard for automated importation of rate sheets?
====

Perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree here and perhaps there already 
is an Internet-based standard for transmitting/relaying telephony 
rate data to customers.  If someone could point me towards it, then 
that would be great - Google did not seem to have any answers after 
some searching.(*)

If not, here are some questions to you, the LD providers of the 
world, as to how you relay information to your customers.  Let's see 
if there is any discussion that makes sense on this topic.

Questions on rate table transmissions:

1) Do you make rate sheets available on-line?
     - to anyone?
     - to just customers?
        - what kind of password method do you use?
        - is it scriptable by automated fetch programs?
        - via what method? (email? web? ftp? database call? other?)

2) What format do you use for the file, if file-based?

3) Do you include all possible routes and costs, or just routes you 
specifically service?

4) Do you include a "default" rate for routes that you do not 
specifically list?

5) How do you list "peak/off-peak" rates?
     - what timezone do you use as the standard? Is it defined the file?

6) How does the table indicate first minute/2nd minute/etc. rate changes?

7) Do you use any kind of wildcarding or regular expressions to 
denote rate areas?

8) Do you use ISO country codes?  City codes?

9) What currency do you use?  Is it listed in the file in a fixed location?

10) Do you use the exact same format for each rate table transmission?

11) Do you use a "closed" format such as Excel or an "open" format 
such as CSV or XML?

12) Other comments and perhaps a sample line or two would be useful 
for the discussion.


Thanks for your comments!
JT



*: TRIP (RFC3219) seems to be a protocol into which cost flags could 
be built, but there are no specific "cost" fields in the RFC, as 
those were left to future implementations.  There does not seem to be 
any traction for TRIP at the moment, despite my best efforts over the 
past few months at finding some programmers to implement it into an 
open-source telephony package.  So, we'll stick with batch-mode 
questions like I describe above.