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

[Scott Stingel]

Hi John-

Over the past couple of years, I've built several calling card platforms for
companies in the UK.

My experience, unfortunately, has been similar to yours with regard to rate
info.  Many (most?) phone card companies, like the ones I worked with, end
up dealing with second-tier international long distance resellers.  The
reason for this is that the few "big guys" don't want to deal with anything
less than several million minutes per month, and require huge deposits in
addition.   This is due to the number of companies that go bust trying to
make it in this very competitive business.

As far as rate sheets, these second tier companies would often send new
rates almost weekly, and printed via FAX.  Furthermore, they often would
send only updates to some countries, and zones within the countries, not the
complete list.  And lastly, they sometimes would have rate "specials" that
would expire a week or two after publication.  All of this made for lots of
work for a "rate analyst" in a typical company who would enter all of this
stuff manually and keep up to date with rate expirations.

I believe the big companies are capable of submitting rates to you
electronically.  But you have to be fairly big yourself to get their
attention as a customer, in my experience.

This may have all changed recently - it would be nice to hear of more
positive experiences from European wholesale customers of LD companies.

Regards
Scott

Scott M. Stingel 
Emerging Voice Technology Inc.
  
URL:            www.evtmedia.com   



> -----Original Message-----
> From: asterisk-users-admin at lists.digium.com 
> [mailto:asterisk-users-admin at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of John Todd
> Sent: Sunday, November 30, 2003 8:31 PM
> To: isp-clec at isp-clec.com
> Cc: asterisk-users at lists.digium.com
> Subject: [Asterisk-Users] Rate file formats: a standard?
> 
> 
> [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...
> 
> ====
> 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.
> 
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