[asterisk-users] Country numbering plan resources

[John Todd]

On Dec 12, 2008, at 7:10 PM, Michael wrote:

> Is there any good free / accurate online resources with detailed  
> country
> numbering plans? Failing that let's get something running ourselves.
[snip]

I'll avoid the good discussion on this thread that has been made  
already to date.  The answer is: "It's not simple."  I wish it was,  
but that data is typically in the hands of companies who do NOT want  
to share it, because errors on your part make money on their part, and  
those companies don't really want to see you exist at all in the first  
place.  It would be great if this could be a shared resource of some  
sort, but I don't expect that we'll ever see that with E.164 numbering  
- the entrenched interests in that number space have zero interest in  
making the data available for many political, technical, and fiscal  
reasons.


In the past, I've received a full breakdown of rates from my carriers  
for North America, as I have typically purchased directly from North  
American carriers who give me a 5, 6, or 7 tier model of prices across  
the country.  LNP has confused the issue a bit, but not enough to  
warrant dips into the LNP database to determine if mobile numbers are  
being delivered on landline, or vice versa.

For most of the world not in country code 1, I typically get just two  
rates: landline and mobile.  In some very large nations, mobile may be  
broken down into a few carriers, but not often.  Carriers almost  
always will NOT give out number ranges for what is mobile versus what  
is landline.  They just say "Mobile: $V.WXYZ   Landline: $A.BCDE" and  
leave it to me to figure out what is what.  This, of course, is  
disingenuous - obviously they know what is mobile and what is  
landline, since they need it for their own billing purposes. But they  
would NEVER try to help out a customer like that, since it makes the  
customer more informed and less likely to just swallow an incorrect  
billing.

So in a recent job (not Digium) I had to get the Telcordia GDDS  
database.  Cost varies depending on what kind of use you have, but I  
seem to recall ranging from $20k per year to $Absurd per year.  It was  
useful - recall that mobile rates can be 10x or even 20x what landline  
rates are, so billing  your customers in the same bracket as you are  
billed by your vendors becomes startlingly important when you hit the  
millions of minutes per month mark in international termination.

http://www.telcordia.com/products_services/trainfo/catalog_details.html
http://www.trainfo.com/products_services/tra/downloads/gdds.pdf

Then, you'll need to create a database that tracks what each one of  
your vendors gives you for mappings, create a linkage between their  
terminology or number formats to the GDDS database, and extract to  
create a routing table.  Non-trivial, but not super-difficult.   Get a  
big machine with gobs of RAM and store all of your databases in  
cache.   The US I seem to recall had (for each carrier) something like  
420,000 rows in one configuration.  Multiply by the number of carriers  
you are using, add in the 60,000 or so rows  for international per  
carrier... it gets to be a pretty plump routing table.

"You must be _this_ tall to ride this wholesale ride."

We created an external Java app that would take the origin number out  
of our Asterisk arrays and then do a database lookup.  Total delay  
between receipt of the INVITE and the INVITE being out to the "best"  
vendor was around .3 seconds, so not bad.  But there is a reason that  
there are whole companies doing routing and rating engines.

JT


---
John Todd                       email:jtodd at digium.com
Digium, Inc. | Asterisk Open Source Community Director
445 Jan Davis Drive NW -  Huntsville AL 35806  -   USA
direct: +1-256-428-6083         http://www.digium.com/