Ideas for VOIP and/or variable-rate billing

[Sven]

Good afternoon,

Having done a bit of digging (via htdig) through the 2 mailing lists
regarding VOIP/FOIP and/or time-based/variable-rate billing I see it
mentioned that it would not involve much work on the freeside end, but more
on the backend database to have such a system implemented. It would also
appear that there are multiple different varieties of database/table formats
for logging customer dialing data using VOIP services. We are currently
using two systems: gnuGK and asterisk [modified]. With the data these two
applications log to a MySQL server along with the rate data we receive from
our VOIP providers, we populate a summary table with the following basic
structure:

user: source phone number
datetime: well ... date and time
destination: the dialed phone number
country:
duration: actual duration time of call
rduration: rounded duration time for billing
rate: rate of this call based on destination and rate plan
cost: rduration * rate
trans: transaction ID used to link back to the account (each account having
potentially many users - see subaccount question later)
call id: a record ID

I am not sure as to the current development status of incorporating
VOIP/metered billing and perhaps this question belongs in the other mailing
list. I was thinking however of the addition of another price plan similar
to "Base charge plus per-minute from session monitor", the difference being
that the session monitor would be a table such as above, populated by our
own scripts, that at billing time would also get the rate and or [already
calculated] charges from the table. Is anyone working on such an
implementation?

A secondary issue to this is the notion of subaccounts. Joe-reseller
establishes an account with us to resell VOIP services. At billing time, we
would send Joe a summary bill of the amount he owes. Joe would also like a
detail page for each of his accounts that he has set up where such a detail
page would resemble, in essence, a phone bill (date and time, number called,
duration, rate, charge). Again, I have done some digging around looking for
subaccount information on Freeside but have come up empty other than a
reference to "Track customers by reseller/agent" in the Features list.

The point of my post here is to a) find out if anyone is working on such
features b) if not, are there plans to c) if there are, not to step on any
toes or reinvent the wheel and perhaps find out what does need to be done to
make this happen (which I can even take a stab at). From my brief foray into
Freeside (and from what our billing people have seen of it now in our demos)
it appears to be a comprehensive product that offers a nice degree of
customization.

Sven Willenberger
Systems Administration
Delmarva Online, Inc.