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PortaBilling: User Manual

1. RADIUS Server Server 1 CORE Server 2 ADMIN PortaBilling consists of two main logical components the master or core server left and the slave or admin or web server tight Typically the master and slave servers are installed on two separate physical computers to provide data redundancy and load sharing Although an all in one combination where both servers run on a single physical computer is also possible and supported this is recommended only for evaluation or demo systems 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 1 0 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts Master server The master server hosts the master database and radius daemon Radius has a billing engine embedded into it and so after it recetves a request from the gateway it passes processing on to the billing engine and sends back a response Billing engine The billing engine provides e Authentication tells the gateway which PIN IP or the like is allowed to use services and returns attributes such as current balance e Authorization tells the gateway which PIN IP or the like is allowed to call a particular number and returns attributes such as maximum allowed call duration e Account processing based on the information from the gateways this bills the call and writes CDRs to the database The billing engine also keeps a cache of current calls in its memory This allows PortaBilling to
2. 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com I6 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts x A new environment is created empty except for a single user account which you will use to login and then create other users tariffs customers and so on By default the username of this user is lt env gt root and the password is the same where lt env gt is the name of the environment you have just created So if you execute the command porta admin pl create abc a new environment abc will be created and to login to it you will use username abc root and password abc root Destinations rates and tariffs Destinations rates and tariffs are the essential parameters which define how a call should be billed The call is billed according to the destination number Called Station Id or CLD or DNIS Destinations Destinations are a list of all possible phone number prefixes to be used in your system You generally need a new phone prefix when you have a new service area for calls which are to be treated differently than others For example if you start providing calls to the Czech Republic you should add destination 420 and specify it as Czech Republic Later if you plan to charge calls to Prague differently than calls to the rest of the Czech Republic you might need to add another destination with the phone number prefix 4202 All such destinations have to be entered into the system before you can use these pref
3. Protocol Date and Time Phone Number Routing Plan H323 SIP YYYY MM DD HH Mi 8610234567 Standard v Destination Country Description Price Route Category Preference Huntstop Route to Vendor Connection Tariff 1 86 CHINA Proper 0 06000 USD Default 5 ny gw 01 VendorB Termination to carrier B Vendor B 2 8610 CHINA Beijing 0 04000 USD Cheap 7 3 86 CHINA Proper 0 02500 USD Cheap 6 4 86 CHINA Proper 0 03000 USD Cheap 6 5 86 CHINA Proper 0 11000 USD Expensive 5 N N ny gw 01 YendorA Termination to carrierA Vendor A N 45 12 156 200 Vendor D Termination to vendor D Vendor D N ny gw 01 VendorC Termination to carrier Vendor C N 193 50 123 6 VendorE Termination to carrierE Vendor E Number translation There are many different phone number formats some used by your customers others by your vendors How to deal with all of them without making mistakes PortaBilling offers a powerful tool called translation rules for converting phone numbers with several different types depending on customers needs Your network numbering plan The key to avoiding problems with number formats is to choose a certain number format as the standard for your network and make sure that calls travel on your network only in this format The ideal candidate for such a format is E 164 of course it is highly recommended that you use this same format in billing as well When a call arrives from your customer with a phone number fro
4. o Customer A with a monthly billing period activated the subscription on April 12 On May 1 he will be charged 6 33 because he used the service for 19 days 12 30 and 19 30 9 99 6 33 o Customer B with a monthly billing period activated the subscription on April 12 and canceled it on the 25th On May 1 he will be charged 4 66 because he used the setvice for 14 days 12 25 and 14 30 9 99 4 66 o Customer C with a monthly billing period activated the subscription in March and canceled it on April 23 On May 1 he will be charged 7 66 because he used the setvice for 23 days 1 25 and 23 30 9 99 7 66 All these types of charges will be reflected on the invoice as separate invoice lines Incompletely used promotional periods If you offer a promotional rates for X billing periods every billing period in which the service was used is counted against it regardless of the amount of days used in the particular billing period So if you offer a promotional period for a first four weeks and customer subscribes on Wednesday his first week 5 days will be charged according to the promotional rate and three full weeks following it From the 5 week the default rate will be used In order to avoid potential misunderstandings when customer expects longer promotional period the best practice is to use an anniversary billing cycle since this eliminates the problem with incompletely used promo
5. LogRequestEnvironment no Write in the log file in context of which environment this RADIUS request is processed useful in case of ASP with many environments and cross environments calls PatternFullStringMatch no When matching a port pattern in connection require that NAS Port Name string will match the pattern entirely as opposed to finding a patter somewhere in the middle of the NAS Port Name ChargeCustomerForIncomingCalls no Charge reseller for ingress call legs in case of toll free numbers etc CheckVoucherOwner yes Vouchers can only be used for accounts under the same reseller CheckDebitAccountOverDraft yes Send an alert when an overdraft is detected on debit account ChargeAccountsWithCustomerTimezone yes Send an alert when an overdraft is detected on debit account UseAlertTime yes Use alert timepoint attribute to calculate the value to be stored in the setup_time columns in the database Using alert timepoint as opposed to h323 setup time allows to obtain a reliable statistics about PDD ActiveCallsPresentation yes ActiveCallsPresentationCleanup_sec 30 ActiveCallsPresentationStalledCleanup_sec 86400 ProfitMonitor no ProfitMonitorLimit 0 CheckAvailableFundsDebit no CheckAvailableFundsCredit yes FullMatchPrefixForVolumeDiscount no When looking up applicable volume discounts for a call check for any prefixes which will match the dialed number increases the load on billing engine and database The defa
6. PortaValidation ResellerABC Continue URL https www mydomain com subscribe done asp How it works e To start using your services a user must go to your website and proceed to the online web signup page e Once the signup form is completed the data will be posted to the PortaBilling server e After receiving the signup request PortaBilling checks the HTTP header provided by the customer s browser and searches for a product with a matching HTTP_REFERER allowing further 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 1 1 8 PORTA Billing100 How to processing only if the host is found in the database If not found the transaction is rejected e PortaBilling associates the Subscription Host with the product for the account that is being created e PortaBilling will use the appropriate validation module to check if the supplied data are correct e The validation module will check the data fill in any non mandatory fields and return the data along with the acquired status to PortaBilling e If the status indicates an error then registration is rejected and the browser is redirected using Continue URL e If the status is OK then PortaBilling proceeds with registration and executes the credit card transaction e If the status indicates an error then registration is rejected and the browser is redirected using Continue URL e If the status is OK then Po
7. Authenticate script available at http store portaone com The only important thing is that ANI CLI must be in the User Name attribute in the AAA requests which go to the billing None of the default Cisco applications support call authorization so the A gateway will not consult billing as to whether the customer is allowed to call this particular destination and what is the maximum allowed call duration Needless to say this may lead to abuse of your service moreover there ate several other drawbacks to the default Cisco applications In order to avoid all these problems it is recommended that you use PortaOne s Advanced Remote Authenticate script or if you need advanced IVR capabilities such as announce available balance or number of minutes modify the debit card application Here is a sample aaa new model aaa authentication login h323 group radius aaa authorization exec h323 group radius aaa accounting connection h323 stop only group radius gw accounting h323 vsa I call application voice ani tftp portaone tcl call application voice ani authenticate by ani call application voice ani skip password yes call application voice ani authorize yes I dial peer voice 1 pots application ani incoming called number 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 97 PORTA Billing1 00 How to port 1 D gateway I 3 Create a customer who will own these account
8. PortaBilling will reject any call attempts above the allowed number of concurrent calls IP device provisioning and inventory If you provide your VoIP customers with IP phone equipment you know how laborious and yet important the task of performing initial configuration is If the equipment is not configured properly it will not work after being delivered to the customer Or even if it works initially problems will arise if you need to change the IP address of the SIP server How can you reconfigure thousands of devices that are already on the customer s premises There are two ways to manage the device configuration Manual provisioning The administrator must login to the device provisioning interface typically HTTP and change the required parameters There are several drawbacks to this method e The IP phone must be connected to the Internet when the administrator is performing this operation e The administrator must know the device s IP address e The IP phone must be on the same LAN as the administrator or on a public IP address if the device is behind a NAT firewall the administrator will not be able to access it Due to these reasons and since every device must be provisioned individually this method is acceptable for a testing environment or small scale service deployment but totally inappropriate for ITSPs with thousands of IP phones around the world 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www port
9. The graph below gives you the ability to monitor how the call volume in your system changes each day uw v 3 T p a Week 27 Week 28 Week 29 Week 30 E eillable calls min 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 85 PORTA Billing100 Statistics and Monitoring Tools Master and slave MySQL server statistics These statistics are accessible from the main admin menu via the Database link in the Statistics section HA Database Load gt Close 4 objects gt Logout Wed Jul 28 11 23 11 2004 QQ gt Fri Jul 30 02 14 46 2004 H 200 4150 Fp 100 fpe Master BO fiit g 18 00 00 00 06 00 12 00 18 00 00 00 sort 6 0 Fe 4 0 Slave 2 0 18 00 00 00 Number of queries W Number of threads Figure 4 2 These two graphs show values for the status of the MySQL servers The green line indicates the number of queries processed by the server every 15 minutes while the blue one shows the number of threads running on the server Queries The graph indicates how many times clients have queried the database On recommended hardware this value may exceed 200 without any difficulties High peaks with a number of requests over 2 000 could indicate improper configuration of the system or temporary problems Also these peaks can appear when replication has been restored after a system fault Threads Norma
10. each with its own numbering format In such a case there will be several alternative routes with different phone numbers 4 PortaSIP attempts to establish a connection to remote gateway 1 2 3 4 using phone number 01142021234567 5 After the call is completed PortaSIP sends an accounting request to PortaBilling stating that a call to remote gateway 1 2 3 4 has just been completed PortaBilling finds a connection to vendor ABC with remote IP address 1 2 3 4 and applies the translation rule s 011 for this connection in order to convert the number from the vendor specific format into your billing format Thus 011 is removed from 01142021234567 and the number 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 6 4 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts becomes 42021234567 PortaBilling searches for the vendor and customer rates for this number and produces the CDRs Active call monitoring PortaBilling can collect information about calls in progress from the PortaSIP server Cisco Quintum gateways and other VoIP nodes The only thing required on the VoIP node side is the capability to send Start accounting records in addition to Stop records This enables several options e You may see a list of calls in progress on the PortaBilling web interface e You may forcibly disconnect a specific call if the call is routed via PortaSIP e You may specify the maximum allowed number of simultaneous calls for each customer
11. from product A to B will have the following effect on this account s subscriptions e Mandatory subscriptions present in both A and B will remain unchanged e Mandatory subscriptions which were part of product A old but not part of product B new will be closed with the current date as finish date e Mandatory subscriptions under product B which the account does not yet have will be created as new ones with the current date as start date e Optional subscriptions will remain unchanged Applying subscription fees When a customer s billing period is closed PortaBilling calculates charges for any subscriptions that were active during this period For each subscription three types of charges may be made e Activation fee if the subscription plan has an activation fee defined and if the subscription was started during this period e Cancellation fee if the subscription plan has a minimum subscription period and early cancellation fee defined and if the subscription was canceled during this period where the total subscription duration is less than the minimum subscription time e Subscription fee a periodic subscription fee pro rated to the actual duration of the service used please consider the following 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 43 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts examples all of which apply to the SIP calls subscription with a monthly periodic fee of 9 99
12. the customer s balance Subscription Fee Balance Calls End of Billing Period As a result at the moment the billing period is closed there may be a significant increase in the customer s balance Progressive method While the situation described above is acceptable for postpaid customers with a large credit limit or if the customer has a credit card which may be charged automatically when the billing period is closed it may create certain problems for prepaid customers If such a customer does not have sufficient available funds at the end of the billing period his balance will exceed the credit limit and his outgoing calls may be blocked PortaBilling provides a solution to this problem allowing you to conveniently offer prepaid VoIP services in combination with subscription fees Balance SC Calls SC Calls SC End of SC Subscription Charges Billing Period To avoid the unpleasant situation of a sizeable charge at the end of the billing period PortaBilling s progressive charges ate applied continuously so that at any given moment in time the amount covering the interval from the beginning of the billing period until the current day has already been charged to the customer For example if a customer s monthly fee is 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 40 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts 9 99 on the first day of the month he will be charged 9 99 30 0 33 On th
13. 19 20 AT 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 as 26 29 30 Mar 2006 32 8 910 11 12 13 14 33 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 34 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 35 29 30 31 gt Dec 2005 Mo TuWe ThFr Sa Su 48 1234 95678 9111 50 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 54 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 52 26 27 28 29 30 31 gt Apr 2006 36567 89011 37 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 38 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 39 26 27 28 29 30 Jan 2006 Mo TuWe ThFr Sa Su 52 1 12 ES Ree 2 9101112131415 3 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 4 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 5303 May 2006 Mo TuWe ThFr SaSu 19 S 9 10 11 12 13 14 20 45 16 17 48 19 20 21 MoTuWeThFrSaSu MoTuWeThFrSaSu MoTuWe ThFrSaSu 5 iim 2 12345 8 ni 6678 INN MEFS 9NNR 143456789 713 1415 16 17 18 19 11 13 14 15 16 17 1819 15 1011 12 13 4 15 6 SAANBAHDA RLAARBAHA 16 17 18 19 02223 oag BaARBwMH MEEFFE 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 22 29 30 31 You can download pre calculated statistics in CSV format for previous days or obtain data online using Custom Query For pre calculated statistics click on the vendor at left then choose the statistics period from the calendar Pre calculated statistics will look like the following 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com Billable Duration ALOC Destination Count Description Calls Calls ASR _min sec _ min sec 1 North America 587 264 44 97445 1449 49 5 29 4 SUBTOTAL 567 264 44 97445 1449 49 5 29 F 420 CZECH REPUBLIC Proper 590 297
14. 8448 Ports that different parts of the web interface are using admin_url https admin mybilling com accounts_url https account mybilling com cc_staff_url https helpdesk mybilling com customer_url https billing mybilling com vendor_url https carrier mybilling com representative_url https agent mybilling com Fully qualified web URLs to different realms of PortaBilling admin interface for instance in case if you would like to run each one on it s own SSL virtual host using default SSL ports Master DSN DBI mysql database porta billing host porta billing master User root Password xxxx PrintError 1 Connect parameters for the master database Slave DSN DBI mysql database porta billing mysql_socket tmp mysql slave sock User root Password xxxxx PrintError 1 Connect parameters for the slave database Backup Keep 1 X Rates Max age days Max_age 60 Pager 25 Base_Currency USD Web 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 1 9 4 PORTA Billing 100 Maintenance Login expiration seconds Login_expire 172800 Login expire if not used seconds Passive_expire 86400 Currency Pager 25 Default values for Card generator Default values for Account generator Billing_model Debit Credit Voucher Preferred_language lt 2 chars language name from iso 639 1 gt Cardissue Amount 1000 Balance 10 Life_time 90 Length 12 Def
15. Always test your translation rules before entering them into the billing A special test window is available on the web interface To access it click on the test icon next to the translation rule field Translation Rule Test gt Close window Translation rule sfr014 Input 011420222333444 Test Save Input 011420222333444 Output 420222333444 This will enable you to check if your translation rule has the proper syntax and you can also immediately see if it performs the translation you need 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 1 03 PORTA Billing 100 How to Locate the h323 conf id fora call Unique call IDs are extremely important for troubleshooting They allow q y imp g y you locate a call in the database and find call information in the billing engine logs or RADIUS detail files Finally and this is the most important thing when reporting call problems to the PortaOne Support team or g P S P PP your business partner a call ID helps to prevent confusion and allows the problem to be solved quickly In order to find the h323 conf id for a call do the following 1 From the main menu go to Trace Call 2 Using the CLD and from to date filters make sure the required call is shown in the list of calls on the screen 3 In the row containing call information click on the re View icon far left column You will be shown detailed information about the call
16. Each of the conditions above e g for calls to US amp Canada or India is represented by an individual discount rule Taken all together they will be grouped as discount plan EasyCall which can then be applied to a specific account e For better management you can associate a volume discount plan with a certain product This discount plan will then be applied by default to every account using this product You may also override the discount plan setting for a specific account so that the system uses a specifically assigned discount plan instead of the one defined in the product e Discount plans may also be assigned at the customer level If both account and customer discount plans are engaged for a certain call PortaBilling will combine them For instance if the account discount plan provides a 30 discount and the customer discount plan provides a 20 discount the result is that a 50 discount will be applied to this call e Discount counters amount of currently used minutes may be automatically reset in accordance with the customers billing period This makes it very easy to implement services such as 200 free minutes per month The discount is applied to every minute which exceeds the threshold Let s look at the following example e You have the discount tule first 200 minutes normal rate 0 20 min 15 discount after 200 minutes for calls to Israel e During one month the customer spends 230 minutes on
17. Monitoring Tools separate file so that the customer can easily monitor activities on his debit accounts CDR files for resellers CDRs calculated using the reseller s wholesale tariff These are the charges applied to the reseller and reflected on his invoice Customer reports 23 6 7 8 91011 12 24 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 25 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 26 27 28 29 30 27456 78 910 28 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 29 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 30 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 33 14 16 17 18 19 20 21 34 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 35 29 30 31 H Logout carrier eah Download Options V CDRTypes Invoice Debit Carrier exchange CarrierBest gt Jun 2005 Jul 2005 gt Aug 2005 gt Sep 2005 are Seamer MoTuWeThFrSaSu MoTuWeThFrSaSu MoTuWeThFrSaSu MoTuWe ThFrSaSu patane custimer 22 12345 26 123 311234567 35 1234 36567 8 91011 37 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 38 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 39 26 27 28 29 30 gt Oct 2005 gt Nov 2005 gt Dec 2005 gt Jan 2006 MoTuWeThFrSaSu MoTuWeThFrSaSu MoTuWeThFrSaSu MoTuWeThFrSaSu 39 124 123456 IBGE 52 1 93456789 41 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 42 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 43 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 3l gt Feb 2006 Mo TuWe ThFr Sa Su 5 A 2 G9 Bas 6678901112 7 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 8 20 21 22 23 24 25 2 927 28 48 7 8 910 11 12 13 46 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 47 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 48 28 29 30 Mar 2006 Mo TuWe ThFr SaSu 9 il ee eo EA ES 10 6 7 8 91011 12 11 13 1
18. a special call handling or IVR functionality which is not available in the applications you already have For example you need a prepaid card IVR which will perform ANI authentication prior to PIN authentication First of all check the TCL applications available as part of the Cisco TCLWare package since what you are looking for or something similar is perhaps already there If you find an application similar to what you need you can use it as a template I A productivity tool for TCL IVR development is 4 available from Porta Software Ltd FastIVR emulates Cisco with regard to script execution TCL API and FastiVR volP related IOS commands You can find out more at http www portaone com products fastivr Make the Periodical payments tab appear in the customer account info The Periodical payments tab will only be shown if the rest of the system is configured to accept payments This requires e Atleast one payment system defined in the Company Info section e A payment system assigning the currency of this account or customer e For accounts the E commerce enabled flag must also be switched on 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 106 PORTA Billing1 00 How to e On the Payment info tab the Preferred payment method must be set and information about the credit card entered For sub customerts or accounts belonging to sub customers the requirements are the same except that t
19. billing e PortaSIP server for SIP calls e Mera Voice Transit Switch for H323 calls Control of routing on the Cisco gatekeeper via GKTMP or other equipment is not currently supported but you can develop your own routing interface for PortaBilling which will communicate with PortaBilling using RADIUS and then transfer this information to the originator in the correct format When a call goes through the PortaSIP server the SIP server may e Direct the call to one of the registered SIP clients if the called number belongs to the registered agent e Optionally direct the call to the voice mailbox PortaUM required if the called number belongs to an account in PortaBilling but this account is not currently registered to the SIP server is off line e Route the call to one of the gateways for termination according to the routing rules specified in PortaBilling Routing of SIP on net calls The SIP server automatically maintains information about all currently registered SIP user agents so it is able to determine whether a call should be sent directly to a SIP user agent Routing of off net calls You can have different vendors for terminating off net calls For example 8 P you can terminate calls to the US either to AT amp T via a T1 connected to your gateway in New York or to a remote gateway from Qwest Rate routing parameters Ordinarily tariffs define the termination costs for each connection to a vendor If y
20. call arriving from PSTN to gateway A traveling over the Internet to gateway B and terminating in the PSTN network once again Of course there must be some way of knowing that these four records are actually part of the same logical call Therefore each of them includes a special attribute that carries a unique ID for the call This ID is used by the billing engine to add the call legs together and is also extremely useful for troubleshooting For H323 calls this attribute is called h323 conf id while for SIP calls it is ca11 ia however for backward compatibility Cisco gateways and PortaSwitch assign a h323 conf id for every SIP call 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com PORTA Billing100 System Concepts 4 tier billing scheme Four separate entities will be billed for every call registered in the system e Account identified entity using the service e Customer an account owner e Reseller optional e Vendors service providers e g your termination partners or service providers for incoming telephony lines both local and toll free This allows you to Bill the end user the owner of a prepaid calling card phone number or office VoIP gateway Bill the customer to whom the end user belongs Bill the reseller who owns that customer if applicable Calculate your expenses for termination of this call to the vendor System architecture sighup VoIP Network Radius AAA
21. customer e By vendor and destination subtotal per country 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com Nov 2004 Mo TuWe ThFr Sa Su 46 il E2 ES CA Se 46 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 47 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 48 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 49 29 30 93 PORTA Billing100 Statistics and Monitoring Tools e By vendor and destination subtotal per vendor e By destination File Edit View Insert Format Tools Data Window Help la x Dae 64Y BBY o B A 4 iQ arial Customer Destination Country Description Calls Rated Total Total margin sec min Cost Revenue 1 USD USD USD 2 SmartNet 3741 ARMENIA Yerevan 7 0 80521 839 13 983333 1 19768 2 00289 3 SUBTOTAL 7 0 80521 839 13 983333 1 19768 2 00289 4 SmartNet 61 AUSTRALI Proper 7 1 27417 8027 133 78333 3 05561 4 32978 5 SmartNet 61404 AUSTRALIA 1 0 43476 369 6 15 0 98769 1 42247 6 SUBTOTAL 8 1 70895 8396 139 93333 4 0433 5 75225 7 SmartNet 43 AUSTRIA Proper 8 2 35228 12856 214 26667 3 20971 5 56199 8 SUBTOTAL 8 2 36228 12856 214 26667 3 20971 5 56199 9 SmartNet 994 AZERBAI Proper 6 1 51933 1305 21 75 3 66377 5 1831 10 SmartNet 99450 AZERBAIJ Mobile 1 0 18463 130 2 1666667 0 40983 0 59446 11 SUBTOTAL 7 1 70396 1435 23 916667 4 0736 5 77756 12 Pre paid car 375 BELARUS Proper 2 106 21 2126 35 433333 6 58076 111 7908 13 SmartNet 375 BELARUS Proper 20 11 2362 5279 87 983333 14 06189 25 29809 14 Pre paid can 37517 BELARUS Minsk 1 0 1825
22. customers may go to the specific domain to access their self care interface and see 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 19 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts reseller s name and logo on these pages etc Reseller collects money from his sub customers and is responsible for paying invoices issued by the PortaBilling owner If reseller exceeds his credit limit this automatically blocks all activities of his sub customers A PB A Bank merchant owner l account 4 invoice B c a 4 Customer Reseller X mM direct 2 N a S payments Kd a EYinvoice E Customer A Customer B subcustomer subcustomer Typically used for Service resellers customers who would like to offer your service under their own brand name while the actual service is provided on your VoIP network and all the billing of their accounts using different tariffs is done in PortaBilling NOTE Billing via the reseller model implies an additional load on the billing engine compared to a retail customer If performance is an issue avoid creating resellers when this is not necessary Both retail customers and resellers are billed according to the credit model Their balance reflects the amount they owe you thus it starts from a certain value typically 0 and goes up with each call made or down with each refund or payment If the customer s balance reaches the maximum credit amount credit lim
23. e Detect and prevent multiple logins for the same debit account e Combine information from different gateways gatekeepers and proxies in order to obtain complete information about a call e Reuse information from earlier steps in order to boost performance Slave server The slave server hosts the following e Web interface consisting of Admin interface Account self care Customer self care Reseller s helpdesk self care customer care Vendor self care Representative self care o Online web signup interface 00000 0 e Slave database e Scripts for calculating various statistics e Optional IVR TFTP server 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 11 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts Improved reliability standby system For quick disaster recovery in case your master billing server goes down e g due to motherboard failure PortaBilling100 can be equipped with a standby server This server is identical to the primary master server with the same software installed The only difference is that during normal system operations the database runs in slave mode with real time replication and so is fully synchronized with the primary master database Porta Billing 100 Standby Master Slave Web Interface dq Slave DB A Billing Engine Sa _ 2 Standby DB ix Billing Engine When the primary master is unavailable the standby server can be switched to the role of primar
24. group in the destination group set associated with this tariff e For every destination included in this destination group the new rate is inserted In other words the result is the same as if you had created multiple rate entries manually Rates which are created using a destination group do not differ in any way from rates created for a single destination One important consequence of the foregoing is that if you change the destinations included in a destination group it will not affect the previously created rates Thus if you had 420602 and 420603 in the CZ Mobile destination group and you now add 420737 this will not affect any of the tariffs In order to have correct billing for the 420737 prefix you must go to the corresponding tariff and add a new rate for the CZ Mobile prefix Call billing parameters Cost based and volume based billing The traditional method of billing is cost based billing This means that once a call is completed the billing engine calculates the charges for the call based on price parameters for the call destination and duration This amount is then applied to the account customer or vendor balance After Maintenance Release 8 PortaBilling100 supported volume based tariffs This meant that you could sell traffic to your customers in volume lots e g 10 000 minutes to UK London 5 000 minutes to UK Manchester and the system would track the total call duration to the specific destination regardle
25. in the home porta billing etc directory on the master server It is automatically created by the installation program and populated with the initial configuration You do not have to edit it unless you wish to alter the default behavior porta billing conf Global Suspicious_Time_Threshold_sec 3599 Maximum acceptable difference in time sent by the gateway and current time on the server Default is 1 hour SQL_Trace 0 Whether all SQL queries and their results should be logged to the PortaBilling log file Use with caution and only when a detailed debug is necessary since this produces huge log files Only full qualified email addresses no local aliases please Email Last_Resort admin yourdomain com If a critical condition is detected e g radius server is down who should receive the email alert Header_From porta billing yourdomain com What should appear in the From field of email alerts Header_To PortaBilling MailList Recipients ax_Sequential_Emails 5 Look_Behind_sec 450 If the Max_Sequential_ Emails in the Look_Behind_sec interval have already been sent any extra email alert will be blocked This is done to protect against email flooding Mail_Templates_Dir Mail_Templates Master DSN DBI mysql database porta billing User root Password xXxxxxX Connect parameters for the master database Simultaneous login prevention for debit accounts Fraud_Detection Active Yes Tur
26. in your system But what if you would like to use MCI first for customer A while T Systems should be the first route for customer B and customer C should be routed to MCI only This can be accomplished using routing plans A routing plan defines the routes for which categories are available as well as in which order they should be arranged route categories with a higher order value are tried first For instance in the example above MCI may be assigned as the Normal route category and T Systems as the Premium category After that three routing plans will be created e Quality includes first Premium and then Normal routing categories e Ordinary includes first Normal and then Premium routing categories e Cost efficient includes only Normal routing category So depending on which routing plan is assigned to the current customer the system will offer a different set of routes There is one routing plan which always exists in the system called Default This is assigned to your customer unless otherwise specified This routing plan uses all the available routes regardless of their route category Routing algorithm The routing principle is simple e The SIP server or MVTS or some other entity asks PortaBilling for routing destinations for a given number 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 59 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts e PortaBilling checks every tariff with routing exten
27. mentioned in this manual are for identification purposes only and are either trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 1 PORTA Billing100 PortaBilling Administrator Guide Table of Contents PROTA CE spinse iania ian nia ani aia 4 Hardware and software requirements sssssssssssssssssssssssrssssrsersrsrrssrrsssrssssss 5 Installaatio Manen E EEA 6 What s new in Maintenance Release 12 oe csscsssessesssesssesssseesneeseeeseess 6 Important upgrade notes ou eeecceesssesssseesseecssessesessecsnsessneesseecsesesutsesecsseessneessees 7 System Concepts seeeeeeeseeeesessssesesseserssssssersessesrnseseee 8 BASIC MOC issiiiaspseniiteren iaaii ievatiadten deinen 9 System APChit CtUle eccccccscscsesssesssscscsssescsecssecscssscssecssscssesssessecssecssecseesseessecssessee 10 PortaBilling100 Web interface ou cccsssssssssesssesssessscssssssesseessesssesseessecsnessee 13 Account and account CYPES eecseccssessssssssessssessseesssessssecsssessessssecsssessseesseessseessses 14 Products and accessibility ccc cscccsssesssecssecssccsscssscssecssessecsscssecssessesseessecsee 17 CUS OME 22 ecssten tienes T T 18 LETAT COT ED 22 Account D based DINING ec ececcsesssesssessesseeesessuesssccsecesecssecssecsecsseesseesseesseeseess 23 Nodes estan eed 24 Virtual environments ou cceccccccccssscssesssesseessecssecsscssscssecsuessuesssesse
28. must make sure that each call made by that customer is tagged as belonging to him Use the corresponding application on yout gateway to handle the call You can use the PortaOne s Session name application or create your own The often difficult part in gateway configuration is designing dial peers to match certain voice ports Dial peers should resemble the following configuration dial peer voice 1 pots application client_on_port_1l direct inward dial 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 98 PORTA Billing1 00 How to port 1 D They will be listed with an operation status of down as the port specification must be accompanied by a number matching a specification for example dial peer voice 1 pots application client_on_port_1 incoming called number direct inward dial port 1 D This dial peer is not adequate for our needs because any number matching the specification will prefer the port specification i e this dial peer will match any port The solution is to use a number matching scheme that will not match any number dial peer voice 1 pots application client_on_port_1l incoming called number A direct inward dial port 1 D This solution may be considered a hack yet it is functional and secure For increased security you may specify a 32 character string with a random sequence of ABCD characters The probability of receiving such a number is near zero So the conf
29. must wait for an accounting record from the trusted GW and use the User Name from a trusted GW accounting record If a trusted GW is not found the call will be charged immediately to an applicable account If an account is not found a security breach mail alert will be sent 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 82 PORTA Billing100 Entering Data in PortaBilling100 Using different protocols SIP and H323 The billing itself is independent from the actual implementation details of those protocols used to carry out the call PortaBilling communicates with the nodes on your VoIP network gateways gatekeepers proxies using the RADIUS protocol and the VoIP VSA extensions for it Thus from the point of view of PortaBilling RADIUS requests related to SIP calls are nearly identical to those related to H323 calls there are only a few different attributes PortaBilling is able to process both types of requests so no special configuration in billing is required to support SIP or H323 calls You only need to add your gateway to the system as a trusted node and then both H323 and SIP calls reported from that gateway will be processed properly Note that from the billing point of view a SIP server is not different from any other gateway it also issues authentication or authorization requests and sends accounting information after the call is completed A node for the SIP server should therefore be cre
30. ntm1 in the porta admin apache brandpane directory a sample file is shown below lt table width 100 border 0 align left cellpadding 0 cellspacing 0 bgcolor white gt lt tr gt lt td width 100 gt lt img src mylogo gif gt lt td gt lt tr gt lt table gt 3 Activate the brandpane feature in the PortaBilling web interface config edit the porta admin etc porta admin conf file on the slave server Web BrandPane brandpane my html 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 116 PORTA Billing1 00 How to If you are not familiar with editing text files on the Unix platform ask PortaOne support to do this for you 4 Restart the Apache web server apachect1 restart Now you should see your company logo at the top of every PortaBilling web page Add a reseller s logo to his customers web pages 1 Activate the brandpane feature as described in the topic above Configure an additional virtual web server which will run on the reseller s domain name e g www supercall com 3 Include conditional statements in the brandpane component These will analyze the domain name the customer is trying to access and will then produce the company name and logo for your domain www sipcall com while for the reseller s www supercall com the reseller s name and logo will be produced See the following example if SENV HTTP_HOST m supercall com
31. relative surcharge with an add duration of 10 First of all the call duration will increase by 10 becoming 5 21 Then this call will be rated using 30 second intervals i e it will be rated 11 30 60 0 10 0 55 and the CDR will read charged time 5 30 minutes charged amount 0 55 therefore it will be perfectly in line with your quoted rates Using billing tricks A Please note that you are responsible for finding out which call rating features are allowed in your business and providing your customers with the required disclaimer Using the old rating method with the new formula The old method of call rating can be represented by the following rating formula e Fixed surcharge equal to the Tariff connect fee e 1 interval with First_Interval duration and Price_First price per minute e 1 interval with Tariff free seconds duration and 0 price per minute if the free second parameter in the tariff is omitted this interval is skipped e N until the end of the call interval with Nex Interval duration and Price_Next price per minute e Relative surcharge equal to the Tariff post call surcharge Volume based billing Volume based tariffs This feature has been replaced by volume based discounts see details below Maintenance Release 12 of PortaBilling100 will support existing billing configurations involving volume based tariffs but you are strongly encouraged to migrate toward a scheme utilizing volume based discou
32. report in the ASR statistics 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 9 4 PORTA K Billing1 00 How to 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com How to PORTA Billing1 00 How to Login into PortaBilling after the installation The default username is pb root and the password is pb root as well After you login for the first time you will be requested to change the password please remember the new password you choose Charge my calling card customers XX min extra when they call a toll free line This is very easy to do with PortaBilling s Accessibility feature 1 Create two tariffs one with your normal rates for example 0 13 dollar min for calls to Czech Republic and the other one with toll free rates including your toll free costs there for example 0 17 dollar min for calls to Czech Republic OO TIP When calculating the price for the toll free line it is not enough to add together your ordinary price plus the costs of one minute on the toll free line In order to make a 3 minute call the customer will spend about 4 minutes on the line while listening to voice prompts entering a PIN destination and waiting for an answer Additionally situations where a customer will enter an incorrect PIN or be unable to reach his party at all should be taken into account Therefore usually TollFree_ Price Ordinary_Price X To
33. the phone 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 3 8 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts In this case the customer will be charged 200 0 20 30 0 20 15 40 5 1 45 1 Sometimes people get confused and will assume that the charges in this case should be 230 0 20 15 39 1 which is incorrect Subscriptions The Subscriptions module allows you to charge your customers periodic fees for using the service If your advertisement states something like only 9 99 per month and just 0 99 extra per month for Voicemail service two subscription plans are involved here When you define a subscription plan you define various parameters that specify what effect the plan will have on the customer Every subscription plan includes the following Name and description Used by your administrators to better manage various subscription plans Invoice line description The subscription name your customers will see on the invoice Activation mode Specifies when the subscription is active and charges start to be assessed Typically a subscription is activated immediately upon its creation or on the start date if a future start date has been specified PortaBilling supports an additional mode of subscription activation based on the account s first use This allows you to avoid problems when there is a delay between the time a customer signs up for a service and the time he is actually
34. the reseller two CDRs will be created and his balance will be modified accordingly Oo for the call to 42021234567 according to his outgoing tariff wholesale rates Oo for the call to 18001234567 according to his incoming tariff Please note that these two calls will usually have a different duration The incoming call will be longer because the customer needs time to enter the prompts wait to be connected and so on In this case you charge the reseller for the actual incoming call duration i e exactly the same duration you are charged by the toll free line vendor Deal with technical prefixes and numbering formats Different termination partners often require that you send them numbers in some specific format For example your termination partner might require usage of the technical prefix 58907 so you have to send him 58901 42021234567 instead of 42021234567 while your local phone provider requires that outgoing call numbers be dialed without the country code so a call to 42021234567 has to be dialed as 21234567 The more partners you have the more likely it is you will run into these problems with different numbering formats Of course it is better to use a single numbering format internally Our recommendation is to use the E 164 format in billing and on your network An E 164 compliant number is one consisting of lt countrycode gt lt areacode gt lt phone gt Examples of valid E 164 numbers are 4202123456
35. to authenticate itself before being able to make the call This is a perfectly normal situation PortaBilling recognizes this and will replace a username identical to the node s ID IP address with a real username from the other call legs 3 Value in User Name is correct but reports Did not find account customer Check the accessibility for the account s product It may be that even if you have such an account its accessibility is incorrect Call was billed but the phone number in the billing is incorrect not in E 164 format and there is a Mismatch in rates or destinations error Cause missing or incorrect translation rule on connection to the vendor Remedy assign a translation rule read the Deal with technical prefixes and numbering formats section 105 PORTA Billing1 00 How to e Call was billed and the phone number in the billing is correct but there is a Mismatch in rates or destinations error Cause missing rate for this phone prefix in the tariff Remedy create a rate for this destination in the tariff 5 If you are unable to solve the problem by yourself submit a problem report to support portaone com Please make sure that you include the following in your email e A detailed description of the call flow and what seems to be incorrect e H323 conf id of the call e Relevant items from the porta billing log Create a custom TCL application Sometimes you need
36. to provide optimal system response time for your online users PortaBilling only performs resource intensive calculations such as creating statistics invoices during the period specified in your configuration as off peak So in the example above if your statistic calculation hours are defined as 2 00am to 7 00am you will receive invoices for US customers on Tuesday morning Invoice templates You can design multiple invoice templates so that each template has its own layout language logos pictures and the like Every customer will be assigned a specific invoice template according to which PortaBilling will create a PDF file that can be emailed to the customer and or downloaded from the PortaBilling web interface by both the administrator and the customer himself It is also possible to use a special Do not create invoice option for a customer In this case PortaBilling will only produce CDR summaries but no actual invoices will be generated Please consult the PortaBilling Templates Guide for more information about creating and managing invoice templates Invoice parameters Every invoice contains global invoice data which is stored as part of the invoice record in the database 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 46 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts e Invoice number unique identifier of an invoice e From date start date of the billing period e To date end da
37. to the customer 2 You purchase a set of phone numbers DIDs to be distributed to your customer s IP phones When a number is dialed anywhere in the PSTN world it will travel to the carrier who owns these numbers The carrier will then forward the call either directly to your SIP server via an IP or to your VoIP gateway via a PSTN trunk In both cases you will be charged by the carrier who provides you with the service according to call duration and these expenses must be reflected in PortaBilling in order to show your cost revenue figures correctly NOTE Account and customer are billed only for outgoing connections Connections from a vendor are purely for calculating costs There is one exception however see Charge reseller for incoming calls in the How to section 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 99 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts Connection Defines where costing occurs Telecom Country Z PortaBilling100 Owner Network Figure 1 1 Connection load PortaBilling can build load graphs for every connection so that you can monitor average load and quality parameters e g ASR for each one Account ID based billing Modern business involves diverse types of services which require different types of billing Calls made by prepaid cards are billed by PIN number calls from a custometr s GW should be billed by IP address some wholesale customers are i
38. vendor CDRs Vendor self care Representatives self care Account and account types Customer care of Reseller System Concepts End user self care Customer self care An account identifies the end user who is using the service For example a prepaid calling card is an account identified by a PIN while a customer s VoIP gateway could be an account identified by its IP address and a SIP phone is identified by its phone number There are two main types of accounts debit and credit plus an auxiliary one voucher Debit Typically used for prepaid calling cards e The balance shows the available funds on the account Initially the balance is equal to the opening balance typically the prepaid amount and decreases with every call made Calls Maintenance time fee e The account is unusable when the balance hits zero e A fraud protection feature prevents simultaneous logins to the same debit account 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 14 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts Credit Typically used for postpaid services e The balance reflects how much the account owner owes you It starts from the opening balance goes up with every call made and decreases when the payment is made CREDIT Credit limi CREDIT Secured model Credit limit Payment j Calls Payment tir e The account is unusable when the balance reaches the credit li
39. web interface called online payments because payment is triggered by the customer who is using the web interface at the moment the payment is made 2 The PortaBilling100 system itself These payments are called periodic because they usually happen automatically over a regular period of time There are three sub types of periodic payments o Calendar payments which happen every month every week and so on This is a convenient way to charge a customer his full balance or some other pre defined amount at a certain moment in time o Balance driven payments which are triggered by certain conditions involving a customer s balance When the 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 51 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts customer s balance is higher than the specified threshold payment is initiated automatically o Automated payment which is applied when closing an invoice The customer s credit card is charged for the invoice s amount due so that when the invoice is created it shows an amount due of zero Payment flow The following picture illustrates the individual components of the online payment system Porta K4Billing100 Bank A APL gt ss Customer i Online A v Business Processor Merchant Online Internet Accounts Payment Bank B Online Ss Payment Merchant Processo
40. web signup PortaBilling allows you to automate the process of subscribing new customers to the service so that customers can do everything necessary online without requiring any assistance from your administrator A template based API for online signup allows you to customize page layout and put a web signup front end on multiple websites web portals web pages of your resellers or affiliates etc The following diagram illustrates the online web signup process a Example page k Online payment Lae lb por signup IC processor Reseller s webmaster Signup 2 PB Signup page Validation in server E 4 J module z web i Provisioning server Sayy 3 database Registration _ p ae successful gi A Online signup D gt module m customer 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 69 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts 1 You are provided with a sample HTML template for the web signup front end the web page which will be visible to your customers for more details see the How 0 section of this guide 2 This page can be customized by the webmaster changes in language layout colors fonts pictures the only entities which should remain unchanged are the names of the HTTP parameters Also since this page is pure HTML there are no limitations as to the web programming tools which may be used to produce the online web signup front end PH
41. 0 2006 05 20 03 00 00 ALL 46 23 121 13 50 00 5 16 9 65 ALL 46 23 121 13 50 00 5 16 30 30 2006 05 20 03 00 00 2006 05 20 04 00 00 ALL 42 18 108 44 42 86 6 02 8 68 ALL 42 18 108 44 42 86 6 02 27 18 2006 05 20 04 00 00 2006 05 20 05 00 00 ALL 7 5 22 55 71 43 4 35 1 82 ALL z Gh 22 55 71 43 4 35 5 73 TOTAL 2006 05 20 00 00 00 2006 05 20 05 00 00 ALL 204 93 526 14 45 59 5 39 42 60 ALL 204 93 526 14 45 59 5 39 131 56 Note that both ASR and Cost Revenue parameters are shown on the Custom Query report Billing statistics Customer CDRs Lists of all customers CDRs are calculated daily and are split into files according to each customer s billing period These pre calculated statistics can be automatically mailed to the customer They are also available for download by the customer on the self care pages and for your staff on the admin interface Different types of CDR files are available depending on the type of customer CDR files for retail customers e Invoice Calls made by credit accounts of this customer These calls will be included on the customer s invoice for the corresponding billing period e Debit Calls made by debit accounts of this customer Since debit accounts are prepaid calls made by them do not affect the customer s balance or invoice Therefore they are included in a 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com PORTA K Billing1 00 Statistics and
42. 06 min 86 0 03 min Cheap 7 Default 5 Cheap 6 Termination Termination Partner A J rmination Partner B Partner C Consider the following example If you have 1 A Standard routing plan which includes three route categories Default order 70 Cheap order 40 and Expensive order 10 2 Six vendors A B C D E F with the following rates prefix route category preference price a 8610 Cheap 7 0 04 86 Default 5 0 06 86 Cheap 6 0 03 86 Cheap 6 0 025 86 Expensive 5 0 11 8610 Premium 5 0 09 ome g mha 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 61 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts then when a customer with this routing plan makes a call to 8610234567 the system will arrange the possible routes as follows Vendor Parameters Comment B Default 5 0 06 The Default route category is first in the route plan A Cheap 7 0 04 This vendor has the highest preference in the Cheap category D Cheap 6 0 025 This vendor has the same preference as vendor C but a cheaper per minute rate Expensive 5 0 11 This is the only vendor in the last route category Vendor F was not included in the routing since his route category is not in the customer s routing plan E 4 Test Dialplan gt Close 4E Objects E Logout
43. 10 CHINA Beijing 0 04000 USD Default 5 N ny gw 01 Vendor A Termination to carrier A VendorA 4 86 CHINA Proper 0 06000 USD Default 5 N ny gw 01 VendorB Termination to carrier B Vendor B 5 8610 CHINA Beijing 0 09000 USD Default 5 N 64 67 2 191 VendorF Termination to vendor F Vendor F 6 86 CHINA Proper 0 11000 USD Default 5 N 193 50 123 6 VendorE Termination to carrier E Vendor E E a Test Dialplan gt Close Objects gt Logout Phone Humber Routing Plan bretoead O Date ond Time d H323 SIP YYYY MM DD HH Mi 861045676 Default v a I Search Destination Country Description Price Route Category Preference Huntstop Route to Vendor Connection Tariff 1 8610 CHINA Beijing 0 04000 USD Default 6 N ny gw 01 VendorA Termination to carrier A Vendor A 2 86 CHINA Proper 0 03000 USD Default 5 N ny gw 01 Vendor C Termination to carrier Vendor C 3 86 CHINA Proper 0 06000 USD Default 5 N ny gw 01 VendorB Termination to carrier B Vendor B 4 8610 CHINA Beijing 0 09000 USD Default 5 N 64 67 2191 VendorF Termination to vendor F Vendor F 5 86 CHINA Proper 0 11000 USD Default 5 N 193 50 123 6 VendorE Termination to carrier E Vendor E 6 86 CHINA Proper 0 02500 USD Default Z N 4512 156 200 Vendor D Termination to vendor D Vendor D Routing configuration example Tariff A Tariff B Tariff gt 8610 0 04 min 86 0
44. 2 1 zeutngy 345TL HTSYMNNH 9H5678NWU 12345678 NC_Vendort 2 910 11213145 3 16 17 18 19 21D May 2006 Mo TuWe ThFr Sa Su 18 Bi G2 Reh SS Tea 20 45 16 17 18 19 20 21 24 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 22 29 30 31 Choose the vendor and then click on the calendar to download statistics for desired period The CSV file will have the following structure 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 92 PORTA K Billing1 00 Statistics and Monitoring Tools Charged Charged Time Amount rom To Countr Description Connect Time min sec__USD 16371160892 16045387437 CANADA British Columbia 18 May 06 23 59 49 00 00 0 48401093476 380444654735 UKRAINE Proper 18 May 06 23 55 33 09 14 0 831 38724057294 16049576339 CANADA British Columbia 18 May 06 23 55 16 02 33 0 06375 69229633258 380440210111 UKRAINE Proper 18 May 06 23 54 43 02 58 0 267 10980649742 420155353262 CZECH REPUBLIC Proper 18 May 06 23 54 39 00 00 0 89417101918 420836579295 CZECH REPUBLIC Proper 18 May 06 23 54 35 02 49 0 19717 68381215044 14257891107 UNITED STATES Washington 18 May 06 23 54 18 00 00 0 5308729569 420511385064 CZECH REPUBLIC Proper 18 May 06 23 53 45 08 38 0 60434 38533206291 420178269591 CZECH REPUBLIC Proper 18 May 06 23 53 05 06 08 0 42934 89925591753 420234720968 CZECH REPUBLIC Proper 18 May 06 23 53 01 04 14 0 29634 95505464273 16044469198 CANADA British Columbia 18 May 06 23 52 55 08 08 0 20334 86756808478 420549749506
45. 4 The first field on the screen should be the h323 conf id which is a combination of four hexadecimal numbers separated by spaces c g SFF7F6D1 715E02C6 A40990F3 C823E27E Troubleshoot an incorrectly billed call 1 Make sure that someone in your organization is subscribed to the PortaBilling mail alerts especially Missing critical information This will help you to detect problems early Find the h323 conf id for this call This is a unique ID a string of four hex numbers generated by the gateway when the call was started which will help you to exactly identify this particular call among all the others You can find this ID by doing one of the following Looking at the statistics on your gateway Going to the radius details directory var log radacc entering the subdirectory for the corresponding gateway and using a program like more or less to browse the file You can search by the number you dialed or account PIN number or just browse the records near the end of the file Browsing the PortaBilling log var log porta billing 1log with less utility for the number you dialed account PIN number or just browsing the records near the end of the file 3 Look in the PortaBilling log var log porta billing log or use View logs on the web interface to find all of the information about call processing there 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 10 4 PORTA Bill
46. 4 15 16 17 18 19 12 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 13 27 28 29 30 31 495678901 50 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 51 19 20 21 22 23 24 26 52 26 27 28 29 30 31 gt Apr 2006 Mo TuWe ThFr Sa Su 13 ill 4 1434567869 15 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 17 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 1S ae 2 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 3 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 4 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 53031 May 2006 Mo TuWe ThFr Sa Su 18 il 2 es es 19 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 20 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 24 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 22 29 30 31 Choose the customer and then click on the calendar to obtain statistics for desired period The CSV file will have the following structure FS tle Edit View Insert Format Tools Data Window Help 2 9 gt _ Account Arial Description Connect Time Time Time min sec__sec Charged Charged Charged Amount USD 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 56 78 90 1 71886073902 380449313591 UKRAINE Kiev Region 30 Apr 06 23 59 44 0424 264 0 616 56 78 90 1 19190767456 420696017957 CZECH REPUBLIC Proper 30 Apr 06 23 59 05 07 03 423 1 7625 56 78 90 3 60572324893 16049576339 CANADA British Columbia 30 Apr 06 23 57 14 02 12 132 0 308 56 78 90 1 46890062001 380698412335 UKRAINE Proper 30 Apr 06 23 56 50 03 52 232 0 58 200 45 23 1 46345311293 380442924858 UKRAINE Kiev Region 30 Apr 06 23 56 26 02 48 168 0 392 56 78 90 1 82226061971 14257891107 UNITED STATES Washin
47. 4 517 8 6166667 1 70469 1 62235 15 SmartNet 37617 BELARUS Minsk 1 0 261 176 2 9666667 0 50695 0 84798 v 14 4 gt gt 2004 02 20 2004 02 20 Inbound b Ki _ OE Ready I F The following data is available e Name of customer vendor e Destination prefix e Country and description of destination e Total number of successful calls e Gross margin the difference between total revenue and the cost for this destination e Rated sec the sum of the time charged for all calls to this destination in seconds e Rated min the sum of the time charged for all calls to this destination in minutes This is the same value as in the previous column only expressed in different units Thus for instance if Rated sec contains 180 here 3 0 will be shown e Total Cost the summary of the amount charged for all the vendor s CDRs for this destination If the vendor uses a currency different than your base one this will be converted using the current exchange rate e Total Revenue the summary of the amount charged for all the customet s CDRs for this destination If the customer uses a currency different than your base one this will be converted using the current exchange rate Note that in the case of resellers we use the value of the reseller s CDR not the subcustomet s since your revenue is what gets invoiced to the reseller In addition you can use the Custom Query report which is identical to the Custom Query
48. 50 33898 1722 49 5 48 690 297 50 33898 1722 49 5 48 380 UKRAINE Proper 1171 626 53 45856 3554 22 5 40 E 1171 626 53 45856 3554 22 5 40 2348 1187 50 55366 6727 0 5 40 s EE M 4 gt gt I 2006 05 19 2006 05 19 VoIP_solu ik i Ready The following data is available Total number of calls Number of calls with non zero duration billable calls ASR Total call duration Average Length of Call ALOC Numbers are ageregated per destination prefix with a subtotal per country and a total for all calls Should you need statistics for today or a report with certain other parameters for example divided by hour so that you see how the ASR PORTA K Billing1 00 Statistics and Monitoring Tools evolved during the day you can use the Custom query report This extracts data directly from the database so use it with caution in order not to overload the server Yao Custom Query gt Close 4 Objects gt Logout Vendor ALL x Customer ALL v Destination 420 E From 2006 05 20 vyyv mm DD 00 00 HH mi E To 2006 05 20 yvvy mm DD 05 00 HH Mi Split Houriy E Interval Pi Calls Billable Calls Duration min sec ASR ALOC min sec CostRevenue USD 2006 05 20 00 00 00 2006 05 20 01 00 00 ALL 56 26 141 22 46 43 5 26 11 71 ALL 56 26 141 22 46 43 5 26 35 34 2006 05 20 01 00 00 2006 05 20 02 00 00 ALL 53 21 132 00 39 62 6 17 10 74 ALL 53 21 132 00 39 62 6 17 33 00 2006 05 20 02 00 0
49. 7 and 16049876543 The following numbers are not valid E 164 numbers 6049876543 NANP format 01142021234567 US overseas dialing format 021234567 local format PortaBilling provides you with a powerful tool for converting all outside numbering formats into the unified format which is to be used in billing For every connection to a vendor you can specify a translation rule that 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 102 PORTA Billing 100 How to will convert the number into E 164 format Here are some ready to use examples of translation rules e Convert NANP North American Numbering Plan phone number area code phone number e g 604 888 7766 into E 164 s 1 e Convert European international dialing format 00 country code area code phone number e g 00 1 604 888 7766 into E 164 s 00 e Convert North American international dialing format 011 country code area code phone number e g 011 1 604 888 7766 into E 164 s 011 e Convert Australian international dialing format 0011 country code area code phone number e g 0011 1 604 888 7766 into E 164 s 0011 e Convert tech prefix format tech prefix country code area code phone number e g 6789 1 604 888 7766 into E 164 s 6789 e Convert European domestic dialing format 0 area code phone number e g 0 5 888 7766 into E 164 assuming that the country code is 44 s 0 44
50. BH Network Busy Hour NGN Next Generation Network NIC Network Interface Card NNX The current general configuration for Exchange Codes within each Area code NOC Network Operations Center NPA Numbering Plan Area NTP Network Time Protocol O OEM Original Equipment Manufacturer OLTP Online Transaction Processing OS Operating System P PABX Private Automatic Branch Exchange PAP Password Authentication Protocol PBX Private Branch Exchange PDF Portable Document Format PIN Personal Identification Number PnP Plug and Play POP Point of Presence POTS Plain Old Telephony Service basic telephone service supplying standard single line telephones telephone lines and access to the PSTN PPP Point to Point Protocol PRI Primary Rate Interface PSAP Public Service Answering Point PSTN Public Switched Telephone Network Q QoS Quality of Service 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 129 PORTA Billing1 00 Maintenance R RADIUS Remote Authentication Dial In User Service RAM Random Access Memory RAS Registration Admission and Status protocol RDBMS Relational Data Base Management System RFP Request for Proposal RFQ Request for Quote RJ Registered Jack RS 232 Recommended Standard 232 Physical interface between DCE and DTE RTP Real Time Transfer Protocol RTCP Rea
51. CZECH REPUBLIC Proper 18 May 06 23 52 33 00 00 0 amp M 4 2006 05 18 2006 05 18 YoIP_solu lk il al Ready E The following data is available CLI or ANI From CLD or DNIS To Country and description of destination Call start time Charged time Charged amount Cost Revenue statistics These are essential tools for monitoring the growth of your business Working with different partners different currencies and different prices it is very easy to make mistakes and carry out non profitable calls Cost Revenue reports allow you to monitor this and stay out of trouble To access Cost Revenue reports follow the Cost Revenue reports link from the Statistics section of the main menu Yao Close Cost Revenue reports Custom Query Objects gt Logout By customer and destination subtotal per country By customer and destination subtotal per customer By vendor and destination subtotal per country By vendor and destination subtotal per vendor By destination Download Options V Aug 2004 Sep 2004 Mo Tule ThFr Sa Su 36 AALL 37 6 7 8 910112 38 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 39 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 40 27 28 29 30 Oct 2004 Mo TuWe ThFr SaSu 40 1E E3 145678 910 42 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 43 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 44 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 There are five variants of pre calculated reports e By customer and destination subtotal per country e By customer and destination subtotal per
52. Call disconnect Dispersion 300 sec Probability 20 30 intervals of 60 seconds Next price USD min Call disconnect Dispersion 900 sec Probability 100 4 N intervals of 60 seconds Next price USD min Figure 1 5 There are two call disconnect elements The first one specifies with a probability of 20 that the call should be disconnected within 5 minutes 300 seconds after this element is entered into the formula ie the disconnect will happen sometime between the 10 and 15 minute of the call The second element specifies that the call will always be disconnected 100 probability 15 minutes 900 seconds before this element is entered into the rating formula i e the dispersion parameter is negative so the disconnect will occur sometime between the 25 and 40 minute of the call Thus when this formula is applied in the actual tariff the result will be that there are no calls longer than 40 minutes i e every call will be cut off at some random instant between the 25 and 40 minute while some calls will even be disconnected earlier between the 10 and 15 minute Too short calls Unfortunately this is a common problem for some destinations usually where analog lines are used your vendor will report the call as connected once the remote phone starts ringing So even if no one picks up the phone such calls will still be considered successful by your system with a duration for instance of 15 seconds and the cust
53. ChargeCustomerForIncomingCalls yes On the PortaBilling slave edit the home porta admin etc porta admin conf and make sure the following line is present in the Customers section ChargeCustomerForIncomingCalls 1 4 Define a PSTN from vendor or a VoIP from Vendor connection which will describe the point where calls are delivered to your network from the vendor and therefore have costs associated with them Associate the tariff created in step 1 with this connection 5 Edit your reseller information Now on the Additional Info tab you will see a new select menu Incoming tariff Choose the tariff you created in step 2 then click lal Save amp Close Now when an account belonging to the reseller makes a call to the toll free number 18001234567 and there is a matching PST N from the 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 101 PORTA Billing1 00 How to vendor connection then makes an outgoing call to the Czech Republic 42021234567 and hangs up the following charges will be applied e The account will be charged for an outgoing call to 42021234567 according to his rates to the Czech Republic a CDR will be written to the database e For the vendor who terminated this call to the Czech Republic a CDR will be written which describes your termination cost e For the vendor who provided the toll free line a CDR will be created which describes your incoming call cost e For
54. Or a Call cccsesssessseessseesssecssnccsseceseseeseeeseeesnee 104 Troubleshoot an incorrectly billed Call ccc ccssesssessseesseessessesseesseesseesee 104 Create a custom TCL Application ecccessessessesseesecsecseessesstecseesseesseess 106 Make the Periodical payments tab appear in the customer account info Sashes safes E ahaasedbesus eguaza S EE A ajoas E E adeeaces eaters 106 Prevent an ANI number from being used as a PIN owes teens 107 Make a custom report from PortaBilling oo cscesssecssessesseesseessecseeseeesees 108 Use ODBC to connect to POrtaBilling ccc ccscssessseessecseessesseessecseeseesees 108 Use the redirect number feature wu ccc cscs esssesssesssesseessecssessesseessecseeseeesees 114 Configure an outgoing connection to a vendor when sending calls using a gatekeeper so that the remote IP address is not known in advance114 Force PortaBilling to disconnect after a customer calls over his credit E E E N A 115 Create accounts to be used for SIP ServicesS ssssssssss0s0000100001101111111110 115 Integrate PB logins to your website ee ecceessseecsseesssecssnccssecessceenesesneesnes 116 Add my company name and logo to every PortaBilling web page 116 Add a reseller s logo to his customers web pages eeccecssesseesseesseeseeses 117 Configure online WED SIGNUP ccecceccsscssessecssesssesssessecssecsuecseecsecssesssecseceseesseess 117 MAIECIAMNG Cis ssssssssssanssnsssasssesessnasssssesnsescdnsnse
55. P Perl ASP ColdFusion and so on After this stage is complete the web pages are uploaded to the subscription web server 3 When a potential customer comes to your web portal and decides to subscribe to the service he is presented with a signup page or pages where he will provide his address credit card information and other required information For extra convenience to the user this process may be divided into several steps first the user will choose a product and click Proceed then provide his address information on the next page and then fill in his credit card information on the third page Finally there will be a confirmation page where the user may check to see that all the information is correct This page will contain all the required information either as hidden variables or as data fields visible to the end user 4 When the user clicks the Sign up button on the signup page his browser will send a request to the PortaBilling online signup server where this request will be processed 5 First the signup server loads a validation module specific to this particular web signup portal and performs a data integrity check Validation modules can be customized by the PortaBilling administrator Generally these involve checks as to whether all the required information e g zip code has been provided but they may also include advanced fraud protection checks For instance signup may be rejected if someone with a Pakis
56. PORTA ONE MII Administrator Guide Maintenance Release 12 www portaone com PORTA Billing100 PortaBilling Administrator Guide Copyright notice amp disclaimers Copyright 2000 2006 PortaOne Inc All rights reserved PortaBilling100 Administrator Guide May 2006 Maintenance Release 12 V1 12 7 Please address your comments and suggestions to Sales Department PortaOne Inc Suite 400 2963 Glen Drive Coquitlam BC V3B 2P7 Canada Changes may be made periodically to the information in this publication Such changes will be incorporated in new editions of the guide The software described in this document is furnished under a license agreement and may be used or copied only in accordance with the terms thereof It is against the law to copy the software on any other medium except as specifically provided in the license agreement The licensee may make one copy of the software for backup purposes No part of this publication may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic mechanical photocopied recorded or otherwise without the prior written permission of PortaOne Inc The software license and limited warranty for the accompanying products are set forth in the information packet supplied with the product and are incorporated herein by this reference If you cannot locate the software license contact your PortaOne representative for a copy All product names
57. S Access Database New A Machine Data Source is specific to this machine and cannot be shared User data sources are ic to a user on this machine System data sources can be used by all users on this machine or by a system wide service In MS Access Create a blank database Right click in the table design view and choose Link tables Choose ODBC databases from Files of type list Select Machine data source Select PortaBilling and click OK Select the desired tables AM RWN Ei Crystal Reports File View Help Dae H GRe amp 7 teOBo o nparl ee eue al Ale m e 1 a3 Q Favorites History ODBC Remove Ng Create New Data Source i Connect Using File Data Source amp CRXMLV36 Add to Favorites dBASE Files 9 Excel Files Delete Favorite HAA amp MS Access Database 3 esa DRE 4 amp Xtreme Sample Database M A Database Files z Data Explorer Browse through the folders to find your data source s tables Select and Add tables that contain data you wont to repont on You can also double click a table to In Crystal Reports 1 Create a New Report 2 In Data Explorer open ODBC branch 3 Select PortaBilling 4 Select the desired tables 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 113 PORTA Billing1 00 How to Use the redi
58. able to use it e g he uses online signup to purchase a residential SIP service but his IP phone will only be delivered by FedEx five days later Activation fee The amount to be charged when the subscription becomes active Minimum subscription period and early cancellation penalty It is common practice to lock a customer s contract for a certain period e g if you provide the customer with a free IP phone you want to make sure he keeps paying monthly fees until he has paid back the cost of the phone If the subscription service is canceled eatlier than the interval specified the customer will be charged a cancellation penalty Rounding To avoid unusual subscription charges like 1 26789 you can specify a rounding pattern for them in a similar way as you have done with rating in tariffs For example the rounding pattern XXX XX XX000 will round up all subscription charges to whole cents Of course every subscription also includes a definition of periodic charges applied while the customer has an active subscription see below for more details 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 39 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts Applying subscription charges Traditional method This a very common and widely popular method When a customet s billing period is closed PortaBilling calculates the applicable charges for all subscriptions which were active during that period and applies these to
59. adoesnacenacanets 120 Configuration files wee eccccccessecsecssccsscssecssccsscssscssscssssssesssessecssesseesseesseesseaseess 121 Glossary abbreviations list oc ceessesssesssesssessecsseessecseecseesseessecsteeseesseess 126 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 3 PORTA Billing100 PortaBilling Administrator Guide Preface This document provides PortaBilling100 users with the most common examples and guidelines for setting up a VoIP network The last section of the document answers the most frequent questions users ask after running PortaBilline100 for the first time Where to get the latest version of this guide The hard copy of this guide is updated at major releases only and does not always contain the latest material on enhancements occurring between minor releases The online copy of this guide is always up to date and integrates the latest changes to the product You can access the latest copy of this guide at www portaone com resources documentation Conventions This publication uses the following conventions Commands and keywords are given in boldface Terminal sessions console screens or system file names are displayed in fixed width font Caution indicates that the described action might result in program malfunction or data loss NOTE Notes contain helpful suggestions about or references to materials not contained in this manual Timesaver means that you can save time by pe
60. aone com 65 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts Auto provisioning This approach is a fundamentally different one Instead of attempting to contact an IP phone and change its parameters pop method the initiative is transferred to the IP phone itself The device will periodically go to the provisioning server and fetch its configuration file Cisco ATA Expert This utility allows you to simplify manual provisioning of a Cisco ATA 186 188 device and browse the device configuration in a user friendly format For example instead of entering values such as 0 1 2 3 etc for codec selection you can choose names such as G 729 from a select menu This tool is convenient for single time configuration of a device or for troubleshooting IP Phone Provisioning When you use auto provisioning for an IP phone instead of entering the same values for codec server address and so on into each of a thousand user agents you can simply create a profile which describes all these parameters Then PortaBilling can automatically create a configuration file for the SIP phone and place it on the provisioning server The only configuration setting which is required on the IP phone side is the address of the provisioning server i e where it should send a request for its configuration file When the IP phone connects to the Internet it will retrieve a specific configuration file for its MAC address from the TFTP or HTTP server and adjust its int
61. astern Standard Time or EDT Eastern Daylight Savings Time Date and time formats Times and dates have different formats in different places in the world For example the same date will be represented as 20 05 2003 in Germany and 05 20 2003 in the US It is important that the user be able to work with dates in his native format in order to facilitate work and avoid data interpretation problems Each PortaBilling user admin account customer care has his own date and time formats When logging in to the web interface all date and time information will be shown in the user s specified format Additionally all data input fields will also assume the date and time formats specified for the given user Call routing When an entity on your network for instance a gateway or a SIP server has to establish an outgoing call it must find out where the call is being sent to To do this it can use its internal configuration for example dial peer on the gateway or some external entity e g gatekeeper or it may ask billing for a list of possible routes This last method has several advantages the routing configuration is in one central location and billing 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 57 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts can use information about termination costs to choose the best route least cost routing Currently the following VoIP nodes can obtain routing information directly from
62. ated in your system so that it can communicate properly with the billing Also products that are to be allowed to use SIP services should have an Accessibility entry which includes this node 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 83 PORTA Billing 100 Statistics and Monitoring Tools 4 Statistics and Monitoring Tools PORTA Billing100 Statistics and Monitoring Tools Billing server health monitoring Entire system load These statistics are accessible from the main admin menu via the System load link in the Statistics section This graph shows the number of calls registered by a production system every 15 minutes normal calls with duration gt 0 green areas and calls with zero duration red line The most recent information appearing on the right hand side of the graph is an hour old or less Calls minute 16 00 18 00 20 00 22 00 00 00 02 00 04 00 06 00 08 00 10 00 12 00 14 00 16 00 W Billable Calls W zero duration calls Figure 4 1 Number of calls If the disconnect time on the CDR does not fall within the past 15 minutes the call may not be finished and hence will not be reflected on the graph See picture below call types 3 and 4 Zero duration calls The graph can also show possible problems in the system such as an unexpectedly high number of failed calls By default this graph displays statistics for the last 30 hours Total minutes statistics
63. ault PIN length Billing_model Debit Preferred_language en Default values for Add card manually Billing_model Debit Credit Voucher Preferred_language lt 2 chars language name from iso 639 1 gt Addcard Balance 0 Life_time 90 Batch Billing_model Credit Preferred_language en Default values for Rates Pager Lines per pag Cleanup_Interval interval for cleanup in days Rates Pager 50 Cleanup_Interval 90 How long old not current rates should be kept CustomerWeb Pager 50 Interval 1 AccountWeb Interval 1 Pager 50 TraceCall Pager 50 Interval 1 Invoice Pager 50 Interval 1 Stats GrossMargin_Interval 1 GrossMargin_Measure day month GrossMargin_Measure day GrossMargin_MaxAge max age in days GrossMargin_MaxAge 1000 ASR_days 90 ASR_weeks 52 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 1 95 PORTA Billing1 00 Maintenance ASR_month 10 RRD It is not recommended to change these parameters without a good grasp of RRD principles Load_delay_seconds 3600 Zero_call_length 10 Load_delay_interval 900 when ASR graph appears ASR_Threshold 5 StatCalc Interval 0 Mask OnlinePayment PassFile home porta admin etc passphrase txt Encryption key for merchant account passwords Pager 25 CDR How long CDRs should be kept in the database Keep_month 2 Keep_month_failed 2 Gl
64. celing closing a subscription A subscription which is not yet active can simply be deleted for instance a customer has signed up for a new service beginning next month but then changes his mind A subscription which is already active cannot be 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 42 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts deleted when the subscription is canceled the cancellation date is entered as the end date of the subscription Typically the cancellation date will be the day on which cancellation took place but you can also schedule cancellation for a future date e g a customer wishes to use the service until the end of the present month The record of the canceled subscription allows PortaBilling to correctly charge for closed subscriptions For example if a customer subscribed to the service on the 3 and cancelled it on the 7 he will still be charged for five days of service Product modifications Changing the subscription plan definition of a product If you modify the list of subscription plans for a given product this will not affect existing accounts with this product This basically allows you to sell the same product over an extended period of time simply adjusting the subscription plans within the product according to current promotional offers without affecting any old customers Changing an account s product and subscriptions A change of product for an existing account e g
65. ces depending on their product s accessibility So if you plan for accounts with a certain product to be able to login to the SIP server and make outgoing calls be sure to include the 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 115 PORTA Billing1 00 How to PortaSIP node with the appropriate tariff in the Accessibility for this product Integrate PB logins to your website You can include the login form on your website using the following HTML code lt form name log method post action https pb mycompany com login html gt Login lt input type text name user value gt Password lt input type password name password value gt lt input type button value Login onClick submit gt lt input type hidden name redirectOnLoginError value http www myweb com gt lt form gt redirectOnLoginError in case of unsuccessful login PortaBilling will redirect the browser to the URL specified in the value attribute Add my company name and logo to every PortaBilling web page 1 The custom HTML component file should be placed in the directory accessible by the web server the best place is in the porta admin apache directory Login to the slave server and become a super user then type cd porta admin apache mkdir brandpane 2 Create the HTML component which will be included on every PortaBilling page Edit the file my
66. ch you provide the reseller with billing gateways and other required components When an end user makes a call you charge the reseller according to your wholesale rates But now the reseller wishes to give his subscribers the ability to use either a local access line or a toll free line The reseller can use the accessibility feature to charge subscribers by different tariffs depending on the access number But what amount do you charge the reseller Obviously when somebody calls a toll free line and then calls to China your cost is higher than when somebody calls a local access line and then calls the same number in China This fact should be reflected in the reseller charges PortaBilling allows you to charge your reseller not just for outgoing calls but also for incoming ones This is done when the call crosses PSTN from the vendor connection In order to implement this follow these instructions 1 Create a tariff which defines your incoming line costs 2 Create a separate tariff which describes charges for incoming access numbers and which you would like to apply to your reseller for instance incoming calls to 1800 numbers will cost your reseller 0 02 min while calls to 1718 and 1206 numbers will be free 3 Activate the incoming charges feature disabled by default On the PortaBilling master edit the home porta billing etc porta billing conf and make sure the following line is present in the Features section
67. check Log Where logs should go Possible values are Syslog File and Console Log_To File This writes a PortaBilling log to the file on disk This is the default option and normally is sufficient for both production and debugging Use other ways of logging only for special debug purposes For logging to file give the filenam For logging to the syslog give description in form of syslog lt facility gt lt priority gt Log_Dest var log porta billing log Path to log file Default is var log porta billing log Log_Dest syslog daemon warn NAS 13 232 103 106 Username 0007777777 Call_Cleanup Parameters in this section configure the lifetime of calls in the call cache Radius_Retransmits 5 Radius_Timeout 3 In order to know when we should no longer expect any packets we need to know the maximum possible delay with which the request can be delivered to radius the last possible retransmit Alive_Interval 60 If we bill by keep alive requests we need to know what is the interval between them Incoming_Session_Lifetime 10 Call lifetime after incoming call leg has been disconnected 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 1 99 PORTA Billing1 00 Maintenance Default_Lifetime 120 Default lifetime of the call Suggestions No_Remote_IP_Auth no Whether PortaBilling should warn you when it seems that your gateways are not authenticating incoming VolP sessions Features
68. credit 3 Account 2 credit 3 Q Q Account 3 debit 9 makes a call Account 3 debit 5 for 4 Typically used for business end customers when more than one account per customer is required Resellers A reseller is a partner who resells your services and for whom you perform service provisioning and the billing of his subscribers He owns retail customers also called sub customers who in turn own individual accounts When a call is made by an account end user the reseller is billed using his own tariff wholesale rates Thus the end user accounttretail customer to whom it belongs and reseller are billed separately they may even be in different currencies So if for instance a partner is reselling your services he will pay you 0 05 USD min for each call made to the US by his subscribers At the same time he can charge his customers any rate he wishes e g 0 10 USD min PortaBilling owner Reseller tariff assigned by PB owner 7 Termination costs 0 60 1 20 86 0 06 min a i r 86 0 03 min Reseller a N Customer tariff Terminating gt _4 assigned by Reseller Carrier 861234567 2 00 lt 86 0 10 min Q d Cust A ys Pea i 20 minutes call os x E2 PESER Henomeneneeeee Reseller acts as an independent service provider he will be able to assign his own rates to his subscribers PortaBilling will automatically generate invoices for his customers with resellers name on them sub
69. cription fee Payment Calls Invoice amount due 0 This type of periodic payment can be activated on a per customer basis using the Payment Info tab and used in conjunction with other types of periodic payments e g balance driven Payment status Every time a payment is recorded in the system this could be a periodic payment an online payment by a customer or a payment entered manually by the administrator in addition to modifying a customet s balance it will also be applied to one of his unpaid invoices If the amount so applied equals the invoice s amount due the invoice becomes paid while if the payment is less than the amount due the invoice becomes partially paid Payments are applied to an invoice cumulatively thus if an invoice is for 30 and the customer makes three payments of 10 13 and 17 following this last payment the invoice will be paid If a customer has several unpaid invoices the payment will be applied to the oldest one If a payment exceeds the total amount of all unpaid invoices the remaining sum will be assigned to the special customer property unallocated payments and applied to future invoices For instance suppose a customer receives his weekly invoice with an amount due of 8 99 Since he plans to leave for a three week vacation he sends in a payment of 36 This entire amount is applied to the customer s balance 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserve
70. csuecsecseessecsecseeesees 26 Destinations rates and tariffs esssessssecssesestsesseessecssesssseesseccseseseeeseesseeess 27 Call billing parameters ou cscsesscseecsecsssecssecssesesssecsecesuessssessncssnecssseeseessnecsnes 30 SUD SCHIP EIOIMS sarena essdt sais ass tusceaics RA EEA 39 JitMVOIGING s c5 2c esscusscuscedgesdseadanssodeasebdevssonenndonveddessvsohbeb onset onaadotastiofed ntSens leds sensteu eboieds 44 PAVIMGNUS si cic0 c dduscescteatistsddeasntiet chats R 51 Term plates ss s cisscsaccccsccch atten nastics gp R i gaan 54 Translation PULCS 5s aseina seve cessbuadseesselaasteeieastinsessel dts essiaxtdan stress a as 55 Date and time information cccccccsssssssecssecsssesscssscssecssssssssseessesssessesseesseesee 56 Call FOUNO oo eeseecceccceessseesssesssscssnecesscessecsuscsssecsssecsnecsssccsnscsuscssnessusessneesssecssseeseeesnessnee 57 Active Call monitoring ou cceccessesseessesssecsecsecssecsuecssccsecesecesecssccsscsseesseeaseeseeeseess 65 IP device provisioning and inventory uu ccc sssessessseessecsesseessecssesseesseesseesee 65 Follow Me Services ecsecssesssecssecsesssscssscsscssscssecesccsscssscssscsseesscssscssecsseaseessecssesses 68 Online web SIG MUP ss sieciccescss csccacciesssciieadicscdtecrassbusseasacg E 69 CUSEOM rapo ionieni n aeaa n nE EEEE ONTE 71 Entering Data in PortaBilling100 0 0 74 Billing CONCEPT uo seesssessssessssscssssssssssseecsscsssscessecsssessusesssecsesssss
71. d www portaone com 48 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts so that 8 99 will cover the existing invoice while 27 01 will remain in unallocated payments When his next several invoices are created they will show an amount due of zero and the status paid in full NOTE Unallocated payments do not represent a cash reserve When a payment is made the amount is immediately applied to the customer s balance Unallocated payments merely show that the customer overpaid you sometime in the past and are used to correct the paid unpaid status of future invoices Collection policy Customer class allows you to define a policy for automated payment collection Important dates e Issue date defines the moment when an invoice was issued all other dates are generated based upon it e Invoice grace period indicates within how many days following the invoice issue date a payment must be received The invoice due date is calculated as invoice_issue_date grace period The grace period can be zero in which case the invoice is considered to be due upon receipt e Suspension time defines within how many days the customer will be suspended after an invoice becomes overdue Suspension means that while the customer s information will remain intact he will not be able to use certain services most notably sending or receiving calls e Closing time defines within how many days a customer account will be closed after an inv
72. d billing product 2 Use the corresponding application on your gateway to handle the call You can use the Cisco application remote_ip_authenticate PortaOne s Advanced Remote Authenticate recommended or create your own The only important thing is that the IP address of the remote GW be in the User Name attribute in the AAA requests which will go to the billing Here is a sample configuration aaa new model authentication login h323 group radius aaa authorization exec h323 group radius aaa accounting connection h323 stop only group radius I gw accounting h323 vsa call application voice remote_ip tftp portaone tcl call application voice remote_ip authenticate by ip call application voice remote_ip_auth password cisco 1 dial peer voice 11 voip application remote_ip incoming called number 3 Create a customer who will own these accounts 4 Create accounts with an Account ID identical to the IP address of the remote gateway and enter cisco as the VoIP password for this account The password cisco has been chosen only for backward compatibility with the Cisco remote_ip_authenticate script With PortaOne s Advanced Remote Authenticate you can use a different password just change the list in the application config 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 100 PORTA Billing1 00 How to Charge a reseller for incoming calls A very common situation is that in whi
73. d compatible with previous releases in the area of maintenance fees however we encourage our customers to start using the new Subscriptions module A migration script for quick conversion of existing products to the new charge model will be provided by our support team Step by step configuration guides for VoIP services have been removed from this manual and placed into the separate PortaSwitch Handbook document Since PortaBilling Maintenance Release 12 enables you to use customer classes and requires that each customer be assigned to a certain class during upgrade a new class called Default will be created and all existing customers will be designated as belonging to it This will allow you to maintain backward compatibility with MR11 e g no customers will be suspended or closed due to non payment If you wish to make use of the new possibilities offered by MR12 you can either modify the parameters for the Default class so that these changes are then applied to all customers who were in the system prior to upgrade or you can create a new customer class configure its parameters according to your preferences and then assign it to individual customers Since prior to Maintenance Release 12 PortaBilling did not track payments applying to an individual invoice for all invoices which are in the database at the moment the upgrade their payment status will be designated as N A 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Rese
74. dentified only by the port they are connected to and so on It is easy to find out that a call has been made The important matter is to correctly determine who made the call and therefore who should be charged for it PortaBilling uses a simple flexible yet powerful method to determine a call s owner Identification of the account Account ID should be sent to the billing system in the User Name attribute For example in the case of prepaid calling cards User Name will contain the PIN IP address for IP based billing and so on Of course an account with such an account ID must exist in the database This way of utilizing the User Name attribute is actually default behavior for Cisco call handling applications and the latest firmware releases of Quintum should do the same SO Due to such an approach logic in the billing is independent from service specific issues You are not limited to any pre defined billing schemes in PortaBilling rather you can design your own Today you can bill by PIN ot IP addtess and tomorrow you will additionally be able to bill by n323 id All you need to do is pick the proper application to handle the call so that a correct identification will be sent in the User Name 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 93 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts Nodes Unfortunately for some types of service User Name is not sent to the billing properly on Quintum gateways In t
75. does not interfere with other tasks This allows you to avoid performance degradation when several users are trying to execute 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 72 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts reports concurrently PortaBilling will execute all these reports sequentially COO This is the recommended method for executing reports e You may schedule a query to be executed at a certain moment in time or periodically with the report results delivered to you via email This allows you to automate reports that you use on a continuous basis For instance you may schedule a Total minutes per customer report for 3am every day then every time you open yout mailbox in the morning you will find all the required information You can view a list of scheduled query executions and their status on the PortaBilling admin interface Query results When you execute a report query from the web interface its result is stored in PortaBilling Thus if you did not save the results initially you need not run the report again as the data for the last ten report executions is always available 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 73 PORTA Billing 100 Entering Data in PortaBilling100 2 Entering Data in PortaBilling100 006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 7 4 PORTA K Billing 100 Entering Data in PortaBilling100 Cost revenue There are tw
76. done intentionally in any case it is not good for your business if this happens How to prevent this and make sure that only your customers and yourself are able to use your VoIP network There ate a few methods which enable you to do this 1 Set up an access list ACL on your gateways so that VoIP traffic will be allowed only from certain IP addresses subnets This is a very reliable method Unfortunately it has one drawback it is difficult to maintain since everything is configured on the individual gateways For example if you have 12 gateways and you wish to add a new customer you have to change the ACL 12 times 2 Set up an application to handle incoming VoIP calls This application will authenticate the remote party by IP address or some other parameter in PortaBilling and if authentication is successful will connect the call There are several advantages to this approach o Information about authorized gateways is stored in one place so it is easy to maintain o The application can include data required for IP based billing in the call information so the User Name attribute will contain an Account ID o It may be combined with authorization so that you can also check if a remote gateway is allowed to call a particular number o You can use more sophisticated ways of identifying a remote gateway For example instead of IP address you can use an IP MAC address combination 3 An improved version of the previous item
77. e Let s take an example if we construct the formula e 3x 60 seconds 0 10 min e Fixed surcharge 0 05 e Nx 60 seconds 0 10 min then when a call is made for 1 minute and 5 seconds the charged amount will be 0 20 in the first interval we use two increments of 60 seconds each with price per minute 0 10 Since this first interval is to contain three 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 32 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts increments and we have used only two the surcharge which follows the interval is not applied When a call is made for 4 minutes and 20 seconds the total charged amount will be 0 55 three increments of 60 seconds each a surcharge of 0 05 and then another two increments of 60 seconds with price per minute 0 10 There is one exception to the surcharge application rule above if the last formula element is a surcharge it is always applied This allows emulation of the post call surcharge from earlier releases Interval Interval 20 x 30 sec 0 05 min N x 60 sec 0 05 min Call duration Fixed surcharge Fixed surcharge Relative surcharge 0 10 0 10 5 Figure 1 3 Figure 1 3 demonstrates how calls are charged For example the rating scheme Charge 0 10 connection fee then first 10 minutes should be rounded up to half a minute with price per minute 0 05 If the customer calls for more than 10 minutes apply 0 10 fee and round the rest of the cal
78. e from a home phone or a pay phone Make sure your telecom provider supplies you with this information in the call setup 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 11 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts Maintenance fees Maintenance is a property of the product which allows you to charge your customers periodic fees A maintenance fee is applied to all active accounts accounts which have been used at least once for a specific product A maintenance fee is applied for the first time on the day after an account is used for the first time and at periodic intervals thereafter If you change the maintenance fee for a product this will affect maintenance fees that are charged in the future but not past ones It is possible to temporarily disable maintenance fees and then start charging them again from a certain date NOTE Maintenance fees remain an important tool in the prepaid card business model For subscription fees in a postpaid scenario a new method is available in Maintenance Release 12 subscriptions Please see below for more details Customers Retail customers The customer is an owner of accounts with whom you interact in your business If for example you are selling thousands of prepaid cards each catd being represented in PortaBilling as an account you do not have to create a customer for each of the cards Rather the cards will be owned by the customer who represents the dealer or distribu
79. e next day the charge will be 0 66 and so on until the end of the month when the charge will equal the full amount of 9 99 Thus the customer is effectively charged a small portion of the total fee every day His balance grows slowly giving him enough time to react and deposit more money into his account Periodic subscription fees As mentioned above periodic fees are charges applied continually throughout a subscription s lifetime Since your customers may use different billing periods PortaBilling gives you the flexibility to assign subscription costs individually for each period For instance if your monthly rate is 19 99 you will not want to offer a weekly rate of 4 99 since the increased maintenance required by customers with a short billing period justifies increased rates PortaBilling allows you for instance to define your monthly rate as 19 99 bi weekly as 10 99 weekly as 6 99 and daily as 1 99 for the same subscription plan PortaBilling will automatically use the correct base value according to the customer s billing period Promotional periods Yet another common business practice is offering special rates for an initial period following signup e g Only 9 99 month while the disclaimer states For the first six months only after which the standard rate of 29 99 month applies PortaBilling allows you to define an unlimited number of subscription periods with different subscription fees for each F
80. e taken into consideration This is an optimal method for integration with an external bookkeeping system where you keep track of your incoming payments via accounting software and not PortaBilling e Balance aware The invoice total is calculated as the sum of all charges during the given period both call and non call related minus the sum of all credits refunds The invoice s amount due is calculated as previous_balance invoice_total payments This allows you to carry over a balance in the case of partial payments For example suppose a customer s March invoice was for 40 If he makes a payment of 30 on April 10 makes calls for 25 during April and is also issued a 3 refund then his April 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 47 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts invoice will have an invoice total of 25 3 22 while the invoice s amount due will be 40 22 30 32 By default PortaBilling uses the balance aware invoice generation method Charging the invoice balance To simplify payment collection and improve cash flow PortaBilling can charge a customer s credit card before closing an invoice So if as in the example above the invoice s amount due was initially 32 the customer s credit card will be charged 32 with payment entered to the April billing period As a result the customer s invoice will be created with a zero amount due Subs
81. eaneaane DSA Internet A EEELEEEEE annnunnunnnnnn 1 800 12345678 Pre paid tariff toll free 0 02 min 86 0 08 min for incoming call sone amp amp Fixed line Z GW NY 01 Accessibility is the main component of a product definition It specifies where your customers ate allowed to use the service and how they should be charged for it Accessibility allows you to specify three parameters to define an access point 1 The gateway on which the service is used What is the exact meaning of gateway in this context For example if a customer calls to gateway A enters his PIN and makes an outgoing call which is terminated on gateway B is he using the service of gateway A or B or both The correct answer is that the service is considered to be provided at the point where authorization is performed In the example above since PIN authorization is performed on gateway A it is gateway A which must be listed in the accessibility 2 Identification of the access number method on that gateway This parameter allows you to use different service types on the same gateway for example according to the access number the customer has dialed Access number is a very typical case you can in fact use any string as long as it is provided by the application handling the call 3 Originating line information You can separate accessibility entries based on originating line information e g if the call was mad
82. ecessary For example say a call is made at 14 03 New York time the time zone of your PortaBilling server The call is made using a calling card running on the America Chicago time zone and the account belongs to customer Easy Cards Reseller whose time 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 56 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts zone is America Los_Angeles The call goes to vendor Deutsche Telekom which has Europe Berlin as its time zone Thus if each of these entities views information about the call they will see it in their respective time zone as follows e Account 13 03 e Customer 11 03 e Vendor 20 03 This helps to present time information in a format suitable for the user The time zone also affects the billing period Thus if a customer has time zone Europe Berlin and a monthly billing period this means that his billing period covers one whole month from 00 00 on the first day of the month until 00 00 on the first day of the next month in his time zone Western European Time in this example Also note that all time zones are expressed in relation to a geographical location in PortaBilling for example Europe Prague This helps to avoid ambiguous abbreviations such as EST which could mean both New York time and Melbourne time Moreover by using such a notation daylight savings time automatically comes into effect when applicable so you do not have to think about whether it is EST E
83. ential number within the batch When creating new accounts you can either create them in a new batch or add them to an existing batch In addition to better account tracking this also permits easy modifications of a large number of accounts You can block or unblock change the balance or perform other operations for either the whole batch or a portion of the batch Note that a batch always belongs to a customer so you cannot mix different customers accounts within the same batch and you cannot have two batches of the same name under two different customers Account Lifecycle Three parameters define the lifecycle of an account Every account has an activation date it defines the earliest date of activation e g you print Christmas promotion cards in November but set the activation date for the 23 of December so no one can start using them earlier Expiration date defines the date after which this account can no longer be used e g your Christmas promotion cards expire on the 1 of January Expiration date is optional so you may create accounts which never expire And finally there is a life time parameter which defines the number of days the account remains available since the first date of use If for instance an account has a life time of 90 days and was first used on May 1 it cannot be used after the 30 of July Life time is also an optional parameter If you wish to allow your customers to use the service perpet
84. environment will see only the users customers tariffs accounts CDRs statistics and so on for that environment There are a few restrictions on the use of virtual environments to ensure their correct functioning e The login name for Admin users must be unique across all environments For example you may not have a user jack in both environment ABC Production and environment ABC Test Rather two users will have to be created possibly abc jack and test jack The same applies to login names used by your customers accounts vendors on their self care pages e A gateway node may be registered to only one environment This is controlled via the NAS IP Addtess so you cannot have a node with the same IP address in two environments You may have multiple customer vendor or account entries with the same name across environments For example you may have an account 12345 in both ABC Production and ABC Test from the previous example In this case the decision as to which account from which environment is determined by which gateway sends the accounting record i e one registered in ABC Production or in ABC Test environment You may create new environments or delete them using the porta admin p1 script on the master server in the home directory of the porta billing user To do this just run the following commands on the master server cd porta billing porta admin pl create lt environment name gt
85. ernal configuration If you decide later to change the address of the SIP server you need only update it once in the profile and new configuration files will be built for all user agents Each user agent will then retrieve this file the next time it goes online 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 66 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts Porta Billing Provisioning server Account phone line i Phone ir ol IP phone config N IP phone inventory record MAC address gt file r rameters 7 IP phone profile General parol Request for provisioning information gt Configuration file gt e IP Phone The config file is specific to each user agent as it contains information such as username and password thus the user agent must retrieve its own designated config file The following are defined in the billing configuration e The IP phone profile so that the system knows which generic properties e g preferred codec to place in the configuration file e An entry about the specific IP phone in the IP phone inventory including the device s MAC address with a specific profile assigned to it e The IP phone or in the case of a multi line device a port on the phone is assigned to a specific account in the billing Auto provisioning will only work if your IP phone knows the address of your provisi
86. ers to be dialed in E 164 as well e g 42021234567 for the Czech Republic However very often your customers will dial this as 01142021234567 instead Such calls will not be authorized since there is no phone prefix defined in their tariff to match this number To avoid this problem you can set a translation rule for this node Thus when an authorization request comes in we will first convert the phone number into the unified format 42021234567 and only then check the rates e Customer translation rules These are applied in the same way as node translation rules during authorization but may be different for each customer for example one customer prefers to dial 00 before the number another 011 If a customer has his own translation rule then this will be used instead of the node based rule Date and time information Time zones Due to the global nature of the VoIP business it is very important to identify times with reference to time zones For example there is an 18 hour difference between 8pm Melbourne Australia and 8pm Seattle USA which could mean many thousands of calls and thousands of dollars incorrectly counted if the time zone is not taken into consideration This is why every object in PortaBilling e g user customer vendor or account has a time zone associated with it All dates are stored in the database in a universal portable representation and are converted into the required time zone when n
87. ersal Serial Bus V VAD Voice Activity Detection VAR Value Added Reseller VLAN Virtual LAN VOD Video On Demand VoiceXML Voice Extensible Markup Language VoIP Voice over Internet Protocol W WAN Wide Area Network WiFi Wireless Fidelity WPA WiFi Protected Access WWW World Wide Web XY Z XML Extensible Markup Language 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com Maintenance 131
88. erved www portaone com 941 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts Vendors Vendors are your service providers for example termination partners or incoming toll free line providers Every time a call travels from your network to a vendor via telephony or VoIP a cost is associated with it So at that point PortaBilling will charge the account and customer for the call and also calculate your termination costs Connections to a vendor Connections define points where calls travel from your network to a vendor Unless it is a direct call between two users on your network there is always a connection to a vendor For connections via IP we need to know the IP of the remote node where the call is being sent to while for telephony we need to know the gateway and optionally the name of the port the phone line is connected to A connection defines a termination cost i e the tariff according to which a termination partner charges you Connections from a vendor It may happen in your business that you incur costs not only when terminating calls but also when a carrier delivers calls designated for one of your customers to your network Typical examples of situations in which such charges occur include the following 1 You purchase a toll free number from a carrier and interconnect with it via E1 T1 When a customer dials this number the call is delivered to your gateway and you can then provide a service e g a prepaid card IVR
89. ervices to help you design a better database schema and optimise your MySQL server parameters in order to increase the throughput of your application Support Support from the developers of the MySQL Server Training Training for the MySQL Server Consulting Consulting tailored to your specific MySQL needs For more information visit http www emysgl com services Press FINISH button to exit from the installation Finish gt Configuring ODBC Before configuring the data source create an MySQL user on slave DB with read only permissions Please examine the following document on how to add new user accounts to MySQL http www mysql com doc en Adding_users html 1 Control panel gt Administrative tools gt Data sources ODBC 2 Select myodbc3 test and click Configure Fill in the configuration form 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 111 PORTA K Billing1 00 How to m ODBC Data Source Administrator RK User DSN System DSN File DSN Drivers Tracing Connection Pooling About User Data Sources Name Driver dBASE Files Microsoft dBase Driver dbf Excel Files Microsoft Excel Driver xls Remove MS Access Database Microsoft Access Driver mdb myadbe3 test MySGL ODBC 3 51 Driver the indicated data provider A User data source is only visible to you An ODBC User data source stores information about how to connect to and can
90. es improved invoice layout ability to define different grace periods and collection strategies for different classes of customers e DID inventory for handling phone numbers to be distributed to your customers e Customer classes for easy management of various parameters in different categories of customers e Self care interface for representatives e Custom reports module with ability to design and upload new types of report into an individual system e A new Call features tab for convenient management of multiple call related options of a customet s account e New features in the call rating module random surcharges random call disconnects e Advanced search for customers accounts e Automated email notification to a customer when a payment is posted to his account e Ability to disconnect a call in progress from the PortaBilling web interface e Support for alert timepoint attribute for precise calculation of PDD post dial delay 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 6 PORTA Billing 100 PortaBilling Administrator Guide Important upgrade notes A We try to make the process of upgrading as easy as possible and to keep our releases backward compatible There are just a few things you should note when upgrading Subscriptions provide far greater flexibility when charging your customers with periodic service fees than the Maintenance Fees module Maintenance Release 12 is fully backwar
91. eserved www portaone com 45 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts By default invoices statements are generated on the day after the last day of the billing period e g invoices for customers with a weekly billing cycle are generated on Monday while invoices for customers with a monthly billing cycle are generated on the first day of the month A transaction is included in a certain billing period if it started during this period this means that calls are considered as falling within a certain period according to their connect time For example if a call starts at 23 55 11 55pm on March 31 and finishes at 00 43 12 43am on April 1 then this call belongs to the March billing period For this reason a billing period cannot be closed the next day at midnight sharp there might be calls in progress which started just a few minutes ago and which should still be included on the current invoice PortaBilling waits a sufficient amount of time before closing a billing period to ensure that all calls have been completed By default this interval is six hours but it can be changed in the porta admin conf configuration file Also note that since statements are generated in the time zone of the customer vendor the billing period is closed in that time zone Thus if your system time zone is Singapore you cannot expect to see invoices for your US customers on Monday morning since it is still Sunday evening then in the US Finally in order
92. f not answered within 30 seconds it would be forwarded to your mobile phone and so on For each of these phone numbers you can define the period when a given phone should be used for example calls should be forwarded to your home phone only from 8 in the morning until 9 in the evening Billing follow me calls From the billing perspective a follow me call is treated as two separate calls Thus if party A calls party B and B has a follow me setup for phone number C the following will occur 1 PortaBilling will check if A is authorized to call number B and for how long based on A s rates and the available funds in A s account 2 If follow me is currently active on B s account PortaBilling will check if B is authorized to call C and for how long based on B s rates and available funds 3 After the call is completed the two accounts are charged and CDRs are produced accordingly one is for account A for a call to destination B the other for account B for a call to destination C For A this call looks like any other call made to B If B is a number in the US it looks like a call to the US and A is charged according to US rates even if the call was actually sent to a mobile phone in the Czech Republic For B the follow me call is authorized and billed according to the same rules as a normal outgoing call from this account So for instance if B is allowed to make outgoing calls only to US amp Canada and tries to set u
93. g system and the other external for VoIP traffic e All of the incoming VoIP calls should be authenticated see Remote IP authentication below This also applies when a call comes from your gateway A to your gateway B When node B the terminating node consults PortaBilling as to whether the call should be allowed it will send an authentication request to PortaBilling with a User Name containing some identification of the remote gateway What information is used for identification depends on the application but typically this is the IP address of the remote gateway PortaBilling will check if there is a node with such a Node ID and if so the call will be allowed NOTE You can only specify your own custom Node ID if you have enabled this advanced feature Normally this is not required and by default Node ID equals the NAS I P Address 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 9 4 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts In most cases all three parameters NAS IP Address Radius Source IP and Node IP are the same Remote IP authentication When your gateway is installed and connected to the Internet via the network interface it can accept incoming VoIP calls and send them onward This is fine assuming that calls are coming in from one of your customers but potentially anyone on the Internet can send you traffic if A they know your gateway s IP address This could happen due to a mistake or it could be
94. ge calculated based on a large number of calls e in 60 of calls no surcharges will be applied at all e in 5 of calls both the fixed surcharge and relative surcharges will be applied e in 15 of calls the post call surcharge will be applied e in 20 of calls the fixed surcharge will be applied Random disconnects Since fees such as the connect or disconnect fee are applied once per call it is obvious that you will earn more profits on many short calls than on a few long ones Also you may not wish to allow your customers to make too long calls as this occupies incoming phone ports on your gateway So your goal is to disconnect some calls so that customers will have to redial If the disconnect occurs at a certain moment in time e g the 20 minute of a conversation it will be very easy for the end user to notice Therefore the disconnect should be made to appear as if it had happened naturally that is randomly The random disconnect element in the PortaBilling rating formula allows you to specify a certain probability according to which calls will be disconnected at a random moment of time during a certain period for instance between the 10 and 20 minute Let s take a look at the example below 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 35 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts Rating Sequence Fixed surcharge 0 20 USD Type Tricky 10 intervals of 60 seconds First price USD min
95. gton 30 Apr 06 23 55 52 02 32 152 0 076 56 78 90 1 57313248507 16047660320 CANADA British Columbia 30 Apr 06 23 55 33 03 20 200 0 1 56 78 90 1 91438981472 420461329009 CZECH REPUBLIC Proper 30 Apr 06 23 55 04 03 47 227 0 94584 200 45 23 1 31773453219 420971480263 CZECH REPUBLIC Proper 30 Apr 06 23 54 41 03 11 191 0 79584 56 78 90 1 68027102122 380975904496 UKRAINE Proper 30 Apr 06 23 53 42 08 49 529 1 3225 56 78 90 3 28478507436 420802726520 CZECH REPUBLIC Proper 30 Apr 06 23 44 12 01 17 77 0 32084 56 78 90 1 15383396548 16042029917 CANADA British Columbia 30 Apr 06 23 44 07 09 54 594 0 297 M 4 gt gt 2006 04 30 2006 04 01 Carrier_e j IQ i gt Ready The following data is available e Account ID if applicable not available for a reseller s CDRs but available for his subcustomers CDRs CLI or ANI From CLD or DNIS To Country and description of destination Call start time 91 PORTA K Billing1 00 Statistics and Monitoring Tools e Charged time in minutes seconds NOTE When browsing data in Microsoft Excel extra trailing zeros might be added for example 345 37 three hundred forty five minutes and thirty seven seconds will be shown as 345 37 00 Use proper call formatting in Excel to eliminate this problem e Charged time in seconds e Charged amount NOTE The call duration shown in the file is based on the charged duration of the call not the actual call duration So if for in
96. harges When using the tricky charges described above one problem is that customers may still discover that they are being charged over and above the per minute rate by comparing the amount deducted from their account to the estimated charges PortaBilling allows you to make this detection much more difficult by applying special charges only randomly As a result special charges will apply not to all calls but rather only to some of them which makes it virtually impossible to reverse engineer your system of charges 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 3 4 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts In creating a rating formula you may assign a probability to each surcharge fixed or relative This parameter defines the chance of this surcharge being applied e g a probability of 25 percent means that there is a one in four chance of its being applied when calculating the total charged amount for a call such that in the final analysis this surcharge will on average be applied to every fourth call Another example is the random charges configuration shown below Rating Sequence 5 intervals of 60 seconds 0 10 USD min Fixed surcharge 0 15 USD Type Tricky Probability 25 N intervals of 60 seconds 0 10 USD min Relative surcharge 30 Type Tricky Probability 20 Figure 1 4 Since every random charge is evaluated independently this formula will produce the following result an avera
97. he payment systems are defined in the reseller information not in Company Info Prevent an ANI number from being used as a PIN The first method is the easiest one use different gateways or access numbers for PIN based and ANI services and configure product accessibility accordingly Thus even if a hacker calls your access number 12345 for prepaid cards and attempts to enter his neighbor s phone number as a PIN the call will not be authorized since although such an account exists its product only allows usage with the access number 12346 However you might need to create an advanced service in which a single access number can be used for both ANI and PIN based services When the customer calls in the system checks his ANI and if the ANI is OK it asks for a destination number Otherwise it gives the option of entering either a PIN or a phone number password In this case you must prevent account misuse in a different way e ANI accounts should always be created with a non empty VoIP password Prepaid cards should be created with an empty VoIP password e Modify the TCL script so that when the first authentication by ANI is done the billing will receive User Name ANI and a special flag skip password Thus authentication will be successful if such an account exists otherwise it will fail and the user will be prompted for a PIN To activate the skip password feature in PortaOne s Advanced Remote Authe
98. his case it is possible to employ username replacement rules on the billing side to emulate this See the relevant section in the How to chapter for more details Nodes are your gateways for carrying out calls Perhaps the most important feature of a node is that it can ask the billing for authentication or authorization and send accounting information to the billing system It is very important that we exchange AAA data only with trusted gateways also called trusted nodes Usually if this gateway is not owned by your company but rather by your partner or customer it will not be considered trusted and so will not be created in PortaBilling as a node Node ID NAS IP address and Radius source IP What is the difference between these terms e Radius Source IP address is the address that radius requests UDP packets come from Radius will accept requests only from those IP addresses which are listed as Radius source IP for one of the nodes This is used as protection against denial of service attacks and attempts to send fraudulent information to the billing system e NAS IP Address is the IP address gateway used for VoIP purposes This address will be present in the radius data as the NAS IP Address attribute and is used to identify which node sent the request Usually Radius Source IP is the same as NAS IP Address except in a situation when your gateway has two network interfaces using one internal to communicate with the billin
99. iguration should look as follows aaa new model aaa authentication login h323 group radius aaa authorization exec h323 group radius aaa accounting connection h323 stop only group radius call application voice client_on_port_1l flash app_session_name 2 1 0 tcl call application voice client_on_port_1l user name abc_litd 1 call application voice client_on_port_2 flash app_session_name 2 1 0 tcl call application voice client_on_port_2 user name xyz_inc gw accounting h323 vsa I dial peer voice 1 pots application client_on_port_1 incoming called number A direct inward dial port 1 D I dial peer voice 2 pots application client_on_port_2 incoming called number B direct inward dial port 2 D gateway Ji 1 Create customers who will own these accounts 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 99 PORTA Billing1 00 How to 2 Create accounts with an Account ID identical to the name you entered in the configuration for the applications abc_Itd and xyz_inc in our example Authenticate and bill my customers by the IP address of their gateway This is another example of how easy it is to implement different billing schemes with PortaBilling For IP based billing you just have to do the following 1 Create a tariff and a product Since Node and Access Code only make sense for incoming telephony calls set node to ANY and leave Access Code blank for the IP base
100. ing 100 How to Note Normally we receive information about each of the call legs separately so it is necessary that you check the log entry regarding the processing of all call legs and the final call clean up 4 The following are typical error situations 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com Call was not billed at all It was considered an on net call because we did not detect that it went to any of the vendors Check that you have correctly defined connections to your vendors Call was billed only to vendor not to an account or customer and you received an email alert The billing engine needs an Account ID in the User Name attribute to correctly identify the account and customer Check the logs to see what was in the User Name attribute Typical situations are 1 Incorrect value in User Name for example phone number instead of IP address of the remote gateway Cause the required application was not used to handle the call Remedy check that the application is configured and associated with the corresponding incoming dial peer 2 On some of the call legs there is a correct value in the User Name while on others there is an IP address When a call is originated on gateway A and terminated on gateway B then a real username appears only in the accounting from gateway A In gateway s B accounting the username will be the IP address of gateway A because gateway A had
101. is a solution in which all calls to your network arrive to a proxy such as PortaSIP which will take care of call authorization while your gateways will only accept incoming calls from that proxy Again the easiest way to implement this is by using IP authentication on both the proxy and gateways We assume that you will use either method 2 or 3 i e your terminating gateway will authenticate incoming VoIP calls to check that the remote 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 95 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts gateway is allowed to send you traffic This may be done by sending an authentication request to PortaBilling where the User Name contains an identification of the remote gateway typically this is an IP address You can use the Cisco application remote_ip_authenticate 1 1 1 tcl provided as part of the TCL Ware package or you can purchase an improved version called Advanced Remote Authenticate from PortaOne Inc Virtual environments It is possible to have multiple isolated PortaBilling instances or virtual environments within the same PortaBilling installation This functionality allows you to use PortaBilling as an ASP Application Service Provider platform or to create test environments which do not affect billing production activities Each PortaBilling virtual environment contains a complete set of data specific to that environment A user who logs in to a user account for a specific
102. isconnect after a customer calls over his credit limit There is no need for PortaBilling to do this as the gateway is able to by itself When the gateway authorizes an account to make a call in PortaBilling PortaBilling returns a maximum credit time in the case of a successful authorization When the gateway connects the call it starts a timer when the timer hits zero it automatically disconnects the call PortaBilling sends two RADIUS attributes related to the maximum call duration The h323 credit time attribute is the standard one announced credit time there is also a custom h323 ivr in DURATION attribute actual credit time The value for the second attribute is computed with billing tricks taken into account Thus in the case of 10 available funds a 0 10 min rate and a 10 post call surcharge this attribute will be 5400 seconds 90 minutes while the h323 credit time will be 6000 seconds 100 minutes If the application supports only the n323 credit time attribute e g Cisco default debit card application then this time will be announced to the end user and used to disconnect the call and h323 ivr in DURATION will be ignored Create accounts to be used for SIP services There ate no special requirements as to how such accounts should be created You use the same interface to create and manage accounts for all services supported by PortaBilling H323 SIP Thereafter accounts can use H323 SIP or SIP amp H323 servi
103. it no further calls for this customer s accounts will be authorized The only exception are a retail customer s debit accounts since these are prepaid and their calls do not affect the customer s balance they can still make calls even if the customer has exceeded his credit limit Summary of customer types The following are all types of customers all of whom have the same attributes such as balance or address info e Reseller somebody who resells your services e Direct customer a customer who directly communicates with your company i e receives bills from you and pays to your accounts A direct customer can be either a reseller or a retail customer e Sub customer a retail customer who is owned by a reseller 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 20 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts Customer status The customer may have the following status Status Credit exceeded me Payment frozen Blocked Closed i Suspended Description This is an indication that the customer s balance is ovet his credit limit so he will not be able to make any outgoing calls unless these calls are free e g toll free numbers Similar to the row above this is rather an indication that the customer s periodical payment has been suspended due of repeated errors e g credit card cancellation Customer is administratively blocked no call services are provided u
104. itioning and formatting the data For example vendor A might have the phone prefix for the Czech Republic in the first column in his data file entered as 420 Vendor B might have it in column number three entered as 011420 Of course it is possible to write an external tool which would convert data files from these different formats into a common one However this would require some extra steps in data processing so that every time you upload rates from a vendor you will have to perform a conversion first In addition this will probably involve extra cost since not all users are capable of writing the required data conversion application This is why PortaBilling has chosen a different approach Instead of making your data suit PortaBilling you can do opposite make PortaBilling understand and process your data as is Templates allow you to specify the following e Media format of the data e g XLS CSV or HTML e Where particular groups of data are located in the file e g data on rates are on worksheet Razes starting from the tenth row e Then you can specify which format each data element is in for example if the phone prefix is given as 011420 or as 420 You can also apply post processing rules the analog of formulas in spreadsheet editors 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 5 4 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts e For download templates ones which describe how data extracted from P
105. ixes This prevents errors and helps you to improve data quality It is recommended that all of your prefixes be defined in the E 164 format It is virtually impossible to have an ultimate destination list that would contain all prefixes for the entire world First of all it is quite difficult to gather and maintain such information Second and even more important is the fact that having all possible prefixes would not offer us any real benefits and would only make rate maintenance more difficult For instance if vendor A provides you with a rate of 0 10 min for calls to 420 Czech Republic and a 0 18 rate for calls to 420602 and 420603 you will need to create three prefixes 420 420602 and 420603 If you also create the prefix 4205 Czech Republic Brno it will only take up space in the database as it will not ever actually be used Therefore we recommend that you follow a required minimum approach only create those destinations for which you will need specific rates for your carriers or customers Destination groups Sometimes you will have several prefixes for the same target destination e g 420602 420603 and 420737 for mobile numbers in the Czech 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 97 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts Republic All of these prefixes can be defined as the single destination group CZ Mobile so when you enter a new rate for this destination group it
106. kward compatibility Fee Seconds Postcall surcharge Figure 1 2 Figure 1 2 demonstrates how calls are charged A Connect Fee is charged immediately upon connection and all calls shorter than the First interval will be rounded to First interval seconds Free seconds are granted after the First interval so this part of the call is not charged Calls longer than First interval Free seconds will be rounded up to multiple Next interval seconds After that the Post Call Surcharge is applied The call illustrated in the figure above will be charged using the following formula Amount_Charged Connect_F First_Interval Price First 60 8 Next_Interval Price_N 60 1 Post_Call_Surcharge 100 Parameters such as First interval Next interval Price First and Price Next can be specified per destination Connect Fee 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 31 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts A Free Seconds and Post Call Surcharge are defined on a per tariff basis and so will be the same for all destinations within a tariff Attention The billing unit may be any length but price must always be entered on a per minute basis This allows better operations with tariffs for example comparing two tariffs with different billing intervals or entering rates into the system from an external source Charging calls the rating formula method This method gives you maximum flexibility i
107. l Time Control Protocol RTSP Real Time Streaming Protocol S SBC Session Border Controller SCSI Small Computer Systems Interface SDK Software Developers Kit SDP Session Definition Description Protocol SG Signaling Gateway SIGTRAN Signaling Transport SIM Subscriber Identify Module SIM Card Subscriber Identify Module Card SIP Session Initiation Protocol SIP T Session Initiation Protocol for Telephony SLA Service Level Agreement SMP Symmetric Multiprocessing SMS Short Messaging Service SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol SOAP Simple Object Access Protocol SOHO Small Office Home Office SQL Structured Query Language SS7 Signal System 7 T T 37 Standard for store and forward FoIP Fax over IP T 38 Standard for real time FoIP Fax over IP TAPI Telephony application Program interface TCL Tool Command Language A scripting language used for gateway products both internally and externally to Cisco IOS software code TCP Transmission Control Protocol TCP IP Transmission Control Protocol Internet Protocol Telco Telephone company such as LEC TFTP Trivial File Transfer Protocol TTS Text to Speech TVoIP TV over IP 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 130 PORTA Billing1 00 U UA User Agent URI Uniform Resource Identifier URL Uniform Resource Locator USB Univ
108. l up to 1 minute with price per minute 0 05 apply 5 post call surcharge at the end of the call will be translated into the following formula e Fixed surcharge 0 10 e Interval 20 x 30 seconds price per minute 0 05 e Fixed surcharge 0 10 e Interval N x 60 seconds price per minute 0 05 e Relative surcharge 5 Very often you would like to set up a general call rating scheme rounding surcharges etc immediately even though you foresee that your rates per minute will change in the future In this case you may construct the formula as you would normally do but instead of entering a fixed price per minute in the formula you can specify use the current value of the Price_Next parameter Later when you decide to change your rates it will be much easier to download the current rate data alter just one column Price_Next and upload the file again rather than change the formula in every row 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 33 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts Using formula parameters linked to rate values has another advantage if you have different prices or interval durations in peak off peak periods the system will automatically use the one applicable Tricky vs honest charges Should surcharges affect the time announced to the user For example if an account has a 10 balance and the price per minute is 0 10 but there is a 0 20 connection fee or 5 post call surcharge shou
109. l values for these graphs are for the Master server lt 2 for the Slave server gt 1 and lt 3 Normally these values will depend on the processes running on the server such as the Radius daemon the Apache httpd server statistics collection tools and so on Larger values can indicate other client connections to the server If the number of threads on the slave name server is 0 this means the replication process is down and requires administrator attention see section 2 4 for details 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 86 PORTA Billing100 Statistics and Monitoring Tools VoIP network performance statistics Connection load You can monitor load and quality parameters for individual connections To see a list of the available connections follow the Connections link from the Statistics section in the main menu E Connection Load Close gt I Logout Vendor PSTN from Vendor PSTN to Vendor VoIP to Vendor Proxied VoIP to Vendor Termination SPT Telecom X Telecom After you select a vendor and a particular connection you will see its load graph 100 120 calls 18 00 00 00 06 00 m Load Setup Time W ASR Load Threshold 5 This graph shows the node load setup time and ASR Average Success Rate statistics The green area indicates node load the red shows relative setup time and the blue line indicates ASR Informatio
110. ld the customer hear You have 100 minutes Should he be allowed call for 100 minutes ot less PortaBilling allows calculation of two call durations during call authorization e The call duration to be announced to the customer nh323 credit time This is a default parameter and historically has been used to limit the maximum call duration as well e The actual call duration when the call should be disconnected h323 ivr in DURATION So the difference between the honest and tricky charge is that the former affects both values for call duration while the latter only affects the actual call duration So in our example above 10 balance rate 0 10 min e if the fixed charge 0 20 is honest then the customer will hear You have 98 minutes and will be disconnected after 98 minutes e if the fixed charge 0 20 is tricky then the customer will hear You have 100 minutes but will still be disconnected after 98 minutes A You are free to use either honest or tricky charges depending on how your business model is set up Please note that it is your responsibility to make a proper disclaimer to customers when using tricky charges NOTE In order to implement this functionality your gateway IVR should be able to work with two call duration values This feature is available in recent releases of the Quintum firmware For the Cisco platform you will have to modify the prepaid IVR TCL script Random c
111. le COPYING that comes along with this distribution As a special exception to the MyODBC GPL license one is allowed to use MyODBC with any ODBC manager even if the ODBC manager is not GPL In other words The ODBC manager itself is not affected by the MyODBC GPL license MySQL the most popular Open Source SQL database is TEE E provided by MySOL AB MySQL AB is a commercial z 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 1 09 PORTA K Billing1 00 How to 2 MySQL Connector ODBC 3 51 Start Installation You are now ready to install MySQL Connector ODBC 3 51 Press the Next button to begin the installation or the Back button to reenter the installation information MySQL http 72a mysql com Cancel MySQL Connector ODBC 3 51 x Installing e amp a CAWINDOWS S System32 myodbc3 dll Current File Copying file DEnETAA NANN ANANA ATAA nN A A A AA a a All Files Time Remaining 0 minutes 0 seconds ise Installation Wizard 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 1 1 0 PORTA K Billing1 00 How to 2 MySQL Connector ODBC 3 51 MySQL http 77w mysql com 3 Click Finish Finished MySQL Connector ODBC 3 51 has been successfully installed on your system For more information about MyODBC visit http www mysql com products myodbc MySQL AB offers a full palette of Professional S
112. ll_PreeCost where X is a ratio between the total duration of incoming toll free calls and the total duration of outgoing calls 2 Make sure your IVR script supports the Access Code feature using the PortaBilling Original CLD RADIUS attribute PortaOne s TCL developers can help you add this feature to your application 3 Create a product for your calling cards and make two entries in Accessibility e one with an Access Code equal to your toll free number and Toll free tariff e another with an Access Code equal to your local access number and Ordinary tariff 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com PORTA Billing1 00 How to Authorize and bill my customers by the phone number they are calling from ANI based billing PortaBilling gives you great flexibility in choosing how you would like to authorize and bill your customers For ANI based billing you only need to do the following 1 Create a tariff or tariffs and a product Note If you are providing both prepaid cards and ANI based billing take measures to prevent fraud e g someone could dial your IVR and enter their neighbor s home phone number as the PIN See the Prevent an ANI number from being used as a PIN topic below 2 Use the corresponding application on your gateway to handle the call You can use one of the default Cisco applications clid_ create your own or use PortaOne s Advanced Remote
113. lling period will covet the time until the 1 day of the month after the next one and thereafter will always cover the period from the 1 to the 1 For instance if a customer was created on March 30 his first invoice will cover the period up to May 1 while his next invoice will cover the period from May 1 to May 31 e 30 days Every billing period is exactly 30 days so if a customer was created on March 20 his first invoice will cover the period from Match 20 to April 19 the second invoice will cover the period from April 20 to May 20 and so on This invoicing method allows you to make subscription fees more straightforward compared to regular monthly billing where the same monthly fee is applied to longer e g March as well as shorter periods e g February or April Every billing period is adjusted to the respective customer s or vendot s time zone So in the case of a customer with the Los Angeles time zone and a weekly billing cycle the billing period will start at midnight on Monday Los Angeles time while for a customer with a weekly billing cycle and the Singapore time zone it will start at midnight on Monday Singapore time Thus while both invoices will cover 7 days 168 houts they will actually refer to different intervals of time with a 15 hour difference Closing a billing period Or in other words when will invoices actually appear in the system 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights R
114. lt img src supercall gif gt else our default domain lt img src sipcall gif gt 3 Configure online web signup Typical steps for online web signup configuration e Decide where you are going to host your online web signup page This could be your corporate website for instance Determine the URL of the page which will submit the request to create an account in PortaBilling You will need to enter this in the Subscription HTTP_REFERER field For instance if your web signup page is running on http www mydomain com subscribe html then this is exactly what you should enter in the field If your web signup portal consists of several pages or screens you should enter the address of the last page i e the one which contains the Submit button invoking the PortaBilling signup procedure You will need an https server and a digital certificate in order to secure credit card transactions e Create a Web Subscription HTML form using the example provided with PortaBilling and put it on your web site You can add or remove some fields in order to achieve the functionality 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 117 PORTA Billing 100 How to you require i e you may request that an account ID be entered if you are providing ANI based service or may not if you are in the debit card business and so on e In the configuration file of the web server usr local etc apache po
115. m a customer specific number plan PortaSwitch will convert the number into your network format It will then travel on your network until it is sent to a vendor for termination Just before this happens it can be converted into the vendor specific format 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 62 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts Customer based translation rules Very often your customer will have his own numbering format for example dialing 00 for international numbers while dialing just the phone number for local calls Customer based translation rules allow you to convert a number from a format specific to this particular customer There is a special dialing rules wizard available to make such configuration easier so that customers can even do this themselves Customer based translation rules have two applications e When a number is submitted for authorization these rules will be applied with the resulting number used to search rates Thus if your customer dials 0042021234567 you can convert it to 42021234567 and find the correct rates for the 420 prefix e This number will be returned to the node which requested it Connection based outgoing translation rules If your vendor requires a special number format e g tech prefix it is possible to apply this rule to convert the number When billing returns a list of routes the phone numbers for routes for this connection will be converted This
116. mers or to a Reseller A Reseller may be the reseller of a service In this case the Reseller is charged according to the Reseller s Tariff but accounts sold by the Reseller could be charged using different Tariffs Products managed by the Reseller 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 80 PORTA K Billing 100 Entering Data in PortaBilling100 Step 6 Accounts Vendor PSTN From Vendor A Customer is composed of one or more Accounts These Accounts may represent individual users of a product such as prepaid cards or IP phones or they may identify remote gateways 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 81 PORTA K Billing 100 Entering Data in PortaBilling100 Billing concept Collecting data from the VolP network PSTN Vendor I E Debit Card GW PortaBilling100 Owner IP g PSTN D bit Card Gateways in the PortaBilling100 owner network are trusted gateways These gateways MUST be listed in the Nodes directory and be a Radius client Gateways which belong to your customers or vendors should not be created as nodes Instead a remote GW which belongs to your customer will be represented in the system as an account If the termination GW transmits an accounting record connection matched the User Name must be verified to see if a trusted GW Node IP User Name is calling If so then the billing engine
117. mit e The balance can also be negative this means you owe money to the customer e g the customer made a deposit By setting the credit limit to zero you can provide secured services as described earlier in which case a customer can only make calls when there is a deposit remaining on his account e Unlimited number of simultaneous logins Voucher Typically used for refill debit or credit accounts for a customer using the same account over a long time e g ANI based authentication This can be used to recharge increase the available amount of a credit ot debit account In this case the balance of the voucher account is transferred to the main account An account of this type cannot be used for making calls Recharging may be done on the account self care pages or via a special IVR script NOTE The default Cisco debit card application does not support recharge vouchers thus you must add this functionality to the IVR yourself or purchase PortaOne s Voucher recharge script from store portaone com You may also use the voucher recharge IVR provided in the PortaUM Account batches Accounts can be grouped into batches Each batch has its own descriptive name giving you two ways to identify an account e By Account ID 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 1 5 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts By a combination of Batch Name and the account s Control Number a sequ
118. mit access to all of the tables in the database It is provided only as an example You can modify it according to your actual needs e g A give read only access to some tables only 4 Flush the privileges mysql gt FLUSH PRIVILEGES Query OK 0 rows affected 0 07 sec Installing the MySQL ODBC driver 1 Download and run the installation package from http www mysql com 2 Click Next on the information screens 2 MySQL Connector ODBC 3 51 Welcome Welcome to MySQL Connector ODBC 3 51 Setup program This program will install MyODBC 3 51 on your computer It is strongly recommended that you exit all Windows programs M yY SO before running this Setup Program Click Cancel to quit Setup and close any programs you have tunning Click Next to continue with the Setup program WARNING This program is protected by copyright law and international treaties Unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this program or any portion of it may result in severe civil and criminal penalties and will be prosecuted to the maximum extent possible under law http 72w mysql com Cancel 2 MySQL Connector ODBC 3 51 ReadMe MySQL ODBC 3 51 Driver README C Copyright MySQL AB 1995 2002 HURKRKKAKAAAAAAAKAAAKAAAKAARAKA AAR ARAAAA RARE This is the source or binary distribution of ODBC for MySQL This software is distributed under General Public License M y S Ql GPL For more information read the fi
119. n FK1 i_product FK1 i_vendor FK2 i_tariff FK2 i_tariff FK3 i_node Vendors access_code Nodes PK i node name balance e Destinations define possible phone number prefixes which will be used in the system e Rate tables store information about rating parameters for a specific destination with a specific tariff e Tariffs serve as a pricelist to be assigned to a specific customer or vendor e The relationship between vendors and tariffs is defined via connections A tariff assigned to a specific connection will be used to calculate termination costs for a given vendor e Every account is assigned a certain product which defines how the account will use the service and how it will be charged for this e A product is related to tariffs via an accessibility table so that a single product may be linked with multiple tariffs e Accessibility specifies which tariff is applied to the account for calls made on a specific node gateway and access number e Accounts are linked to a customer so that a single customer can have multiple accounts 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 76 PORTA Billing 100 Entering Data in PortaBilling100 Step 1 Your Network Your network PortaBilling is designed for an IP telephony service provider which we will call the Company All information kept within the system is used to calculate the financial status between the Company and its Vendors and Resellers
120. n the prepaid card s IVR the customer will not be authorized to call this destination o If there is no authorization the customer will actually be able to make a call but PortaBilling will not be able to bill it properly since required information is missing An email alert will be sent and a special CDR will be written into the database so you will still have an overview of this call It is highly recommended that you always use authorization of calls via PortaBilling Relationship between destinations rates and tariffs Let s move from VoIP to a simpler scenario Imagine you are the owner of an office supply store You have to manage your inventory and price lists for customers and resellers 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 9 8 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts First of all you must create a catalog of all the items you intend to sell This is your internal document containing entries such as 20001 ball point pen blue 20002 ball point pen black 50345 stapler and so on Note that this is just a description of the items without prices since the price will depend on the specific vendor customer You will receive price lists from your suppliers and convert them into data files for every vendor such as Office Depot 20001 0 35 20002 0 35 etc Note two things there is no need to include an item description in every file you can always extract thi
121. n you clearly cannot use a VoIP to Vendor connection since the IP address of the remote gateway will be assigned dynamically The solution is to set up an IPIPGW and use it to send traffic to this vendor If you only have one such vendor whose termination IP address is unknown beforehand and are sure that everything sent to the unknown IP address is going to this vendor you can use a special feature in PortaBilling to handle this situation create a VoIP to Vendor connection and enter ANY as the remote IP address Any outgoing VoIP 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 11 4 PORTA Billing100 How to call which goes neither to one of your trusted nodes nor any IP addresses explicitly defined in other connections will match this connection If you have more than one such vendor whose remote IP is not known in advance this method is no longer applicable If you are using tech prefixes so that the phone number changes based on which cartier is being used e g a call to 42021234567 will go to vendor A as 12345 42021234567 and to vendor B as 9876542021234567 you can use connection match by prefix In the example above enter PREFIX 12345 in the Remote IP field for the connection to vendor A and PREFIX 98765 for the connection to vendor B Such a prefix connection will be matched only if the call does not go via a connection with a specific IP address or to a trusted node Force PortaBilling to d
122. n appears on this graph with a one hour delay a a 2 a aa aes Oe 4 4 Now 900 Now 0 Time sec Assumptions Calls with a duration of more then 3 600 seconds are rare and do not affect our statistics very much zero duration calls need an average duration of 10 seconds to be processed by the router 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 87 PORTA Billing100 Statistics and Monitoring Tools Connection load calculations For a better understanding of the calculations performed consider the following diagram Now 900 Now 0 Time sec The total duration must be calculated for all calls processed by the system corresponding to the interval between now 1 hour 15 minutes and now 1 hour Four different call types are recognized in the above diagram an additional call type is zero duration Sum of durations of all the calls Sum of durations between t0 and disconnect_time Sum of durations between connect_time and t1 Calculate sum as number of calls 900 seconds Calculate sum as number of calls 10 sec Ole bn The maximum value in seconds which a connection can hold in the 900 sec interval is calculated as capacity 900sec The connection load is calculated as the sum of durations for all call types divided by the maximum value in seconds The result is shown as a percentage value multiplied by 100 ASR calculations Assumption Connection load less
123. n call rating You create a call formula which is then applied to the call This formula can consist of an unlimited number of charge elements the only limit is the length of the formula text These elements are e Interval charged part of remaining call duration the parameters for this element are o Duration rounding period in seconds o Count number of rounding periods in the interval o Price per minute automatically prorated according to the rounding period duration The charge for the interval is calculated as Total N Duration 60 Price_per_minute Where n is either equal to count if Call_Duration is more than Count Durat ion ot else Call_Duration Duration rounded up Thus you can create intervals such as First 10 minutes price per minute is 0 05 and we will round up to 30 seconds in this case the duration will be 30 the price per minute 0 05 and the count 20 because there are twenty 30 second intervals in 10 minutes e Fixed Surcharge fixed amount to be added to the total call cost e Relative Surcharge the total call cost at this moment will be increased by X Formula elements are applied until there is no more non charged call duration left The surcharges which follow a certain interval are applied only if this interval has been fulfilled Fulfilled means that the interval is covered completely i e the remaining call duration was enough to cover the count Duration tim
124. n the fraud protection on Test_Mode No Turn the fraud detection on Debit accounts will be allowed to login more than once but an email alert will be sent Recovery_Time_sec 1800 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 1 94 PORTA Billing1 00 Maintenance After a debit account is successfully authenticated how long should this information should be kept in the memory Default is 30 minutes A longer recovery time will increase the amount of memory required by the billing engine Node IP Cache Node IP Cache Cache_Cleanup_Time_sec 600 How often information about nodes and connections should be updated from the database You can force nodes connections to reload by sending a HUP signal to the radius daemon radcheck pl Self Test Timeout_sec 5 Test_Frequency_sec 60 Errors Before _Restart 3 Path_To_Lock_File var run radcheck pid NAS IP Address 127 0 0 1 Shared_Secret SecretKey User Name 127 0 0 1 Password cisco This section defines parameters for the PortaBilling self test suite The script periodically sends an authentication request to the radius server and expects a positive answer radcheck pl amp porta clients pl Radius Host 127 0 0 1 Path_To_radius sh home porta billing radius_scripts radius sh Path_To_Config var db raddb Path_To_PID_File var run radiusd pid General parameters of the radius server required by the scripts as a self
125. nt account When payment is initiated either by the customer from web self care or automatically the system connects to the online payment processor and performs the transaction The online payment processor verifies the credit card information and performs optional steps such as address verification ot CVV control Upon receiving confirmation that the transaction was successful PortaBilling writes transaction information to the PortaBilling database and modifies the balance for the account customer 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 53 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts Supported payment methods The choice of available payment methods depends on an online payment processor but in general PortaBilling100 supports the following payment methods e MasterCard e VISA e American Express e Discover e FirePay e Switch Maestro e E check direct debit of a bank account Templates Templates are a powerful and flexible tool that designates the relationship between data and its representation Let s take a practical example vendors send you their rates and you have to enter this data into the system Obviously regardless of the particular numbering plans formats and other options this data has to be in the unified format used in PortaBilling Some vendors use Microsoft Excel others text based formats for example CSV Even if the same format is used there will be different ways of pos
126. nticate script simply include the skip password yes configuration parameter for this application e When a user enters a PIN the PIN is provided in the User Name and the Password attribute is empty The system checks for such an account and since the password is empty for prepaid card VoIP authentication is successful If somebody tries to enter an ANI number as the PIN authentication will fail because the password supplied does not match the one assigned to the account e If given the option enter your registered phone number the user will then enter both his phone number and password the latter is required to prevent unauthorized usage of his account 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 107 PORTA Billing1 00 How to and both will be supplied to the billing Authentication will be successful only if a correct account ID and password are provided Make a custom report from PortaBilling PortaBilling provides you with an open data model An ER diagram of the database structure is not included in this document but may be obtained from Porta Software Ltd upon request If you want to prepare custom reports on your workstation or a non PortaBilling server you will need to do the following e Make sure the remote computer has database drivers installed to access the PortaBilling database Normally you would use native MySQL connectivity on Unix based hosts and ODBC on Windows based host
127. ntification CMS Call Management Services CPE Customer Premise Equipment CRM Customer Relationship Management D DCE Data Communications Equipment DHCP Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol DID Direct Inward Dialing DMZ Demilitarized Zone DNS Domain Name System DSL Digital Subscriber Line DTE Data Terminal Equipment DTMF Dual tone multifrequency Use of two simultaneous voice band tones for dialing such as touch tone E E 1 Europa 1 European equivalent to T1 but higher bandwidth E911 Enhanced 911 ENUM Electronic Numbering F FAQ Frequently Asked Questions FCC Federal Communications Commission FoIP Fax over IP FQDN Fully qualified domain name Full name of a system rather than just it s hostname For example test is a hostname and test portaone com is an FQDN FXO Foreign Exchange Office FXS Foreign Exchange Station 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 127 PORTA Billing1 00 Maintenance G GK Gatekeeper entity that maintains a registry of devices in a H323 network GMT Greenwich Mean Time GSM Global System for Mobile Communications GUI Graphical User Interface GUID Globally Unique Identifier also called h323 conf id Identifier for end to end calls A new GUID is assigned to each new call There may be numerous calls within a single session H HDD Hard Disk D
128. ntil the blocked status is removed by the administrator The customer still has access to his self care pages The blocked customers are not subject to maintenance charges but subscription fees still apply Services for this customer have been suspended due to an overdue invoice When the payment is received whether the customer makes an online payment or a periodical payment is applied or the administrator enters a cash cheque payment manually and this payment covers the overdue invoice the suspension is automatically lifted The customer s account is closed and is kept in the database only for information regulatory purposes no further operations are possible with this entity Customer classes Customer classes allow you to define a set of parameters which will be shared among a certain category of customers For instance suppose your invoice term for retail customers is Net 21 days while for business customers it is Net 30 days If your operators enter these values manually for each customer there will inevitably be mistakes Instead you can define two separate customer classes one named Retail and the other Business and define these parameters within them After that your operators need only assign a specific class to a given customer in order for the customer to automatically inherit all the class properties grace period invoice template and so on 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Res
129. nts as this provides far better management of traffic volumes Volume based discounts Sometimes you want to adjust rates based on the volume of traffic your customer has already sent you volume based discounts are ideal for this Key features of volume based discounts include the following 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 37 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts e A discount is defined per destination group For example if you wish to provide special rates for calls to ex USSR countries you can create a destination group that will contain prefixes for Russia Ukraine Belorussia and others and define a single discount rule for this destination group e Multiple discount steps per destination group For example you can define a discount rule stating first 200 minutes free 100 discount then up to 500 minutes at the normal rate 0 discount then a 10 discount for every minute up to 1 000 minutes and a 20 discount for every minute over 1 000 e You can use thresholds based on call time e g 10 discount after 200 minutes or on the call cost 10 discount after more than 10 worth of calls e Several discount rules may be grouped into a volume discount plan For instance your service may include 300 free monthly minutes to US amp Canada 100 free monthly minutes to Western Europe and a special offer of 15 off calls to India after the customer has called for more than 200 minutes
130. o charge a customet s credit card has failed due to a temporary problem e g he exceeded his credit limit having recently made a very expensive purchase but has now paid his credit card bill In such a case it would be useful to try charging his card sometime later However since the merchant bank will usually charge you for every failed credit card transaction this should not be done too often In the customer class definition you can specify when re collect attempts should be made e g 0 3 7 means that PortaBilling will attempt to charge the customer s credit card on the due date 3 days after the due date and 7 days after the due date Suspension warning time As a last resort to prevent service interruption PortaBilling will send another alert to the customer prior to service suspension This parameter may also be configured in the customer class definition Customer account while in the collection While the customer has an unpaid or overdue invoice all call services are rendered as usual subscription fees are charged for the current period and new invoices are generated for instance if your customer has net payment terms of 60 days by the time his invoice will become overdue he may have two other newer invoices generated When a customer has a suspended status his call services are blocked but the subscription fees are still applied since his account is provisioned e g his voicemail is kept on the se
131. o independent parts of the billing configuration Cost Revenue Tariffs Destinations C Y Products Zz v b Accounts Customers Resellers Y 9 Customer CDR 9 The Cost part provides you with information about expenses associated with running your VoIP business call termination incoming toll free lines etc The Revenue part calculates charges applicable to your customers Note that these parts are independent the only common item is Destinations So the amount charged to your customer is unrelated to your termination expenses and vice versa PortaBillingl00O data model concept The illustration below shows some major elements and their interrelationships For the sake of clarity only the most important tables and columns are shown 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 75 PORTA Billing100 Entering Data in PortaBilling100 Customers Destinations PK iccustomer PK i dest name destination balance Accounts Tariffs Rates PK i tariff Laccount PK Ji rate id Z name balance Products FK1 i_dest i produt _ gt _ _ FK2 i_tariff i_customer PK i product name Accessibility connections PK i accessibility PK i connectio
132. oice becomes overdue Let s take a look at the following example Customer A has a grace period of 21 days a suspension time of 14 days and a closing time of 21 days A s invoice was generated on May 1 so that the invoice due date is May 22 If A does not pay by that date the invoice will become overdue 14 days 2 weeks after that on June 5 his account will be suspended and on June 12 21 days after the due date or one week after the suspension date his account will be permanently closed Notifications regarding payment due Since it may happen that a customer has lost or overlooked the original invoice PortaBilling can send automated notifications to a customer several times before the invoice due date stating that payment has still not been received You can configure any set of days e g 10 7 1 will send notifications 10 days 7 days and 1 day prior to the invoice due date 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 49 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts Overdue invoice notifications When an invoice is past its due date PortaBilling will continue notification attempts but in this case using a different notification text Here again you have complete freedom in configuring this notification policy for instance 0 7 14 will send an alert to the customer on the due date and then 7 and 14 days later Re collection attempts It could be that the initial attempt t
133. omer will be charged for them which will probably lead to disputes and arguments Using the new call rating formula you can specify that short calls to a specific destination be disregarded So if you set the Do not bill calls shorter than parameter to 20 for a certain destination and if a call lasts less than 20 seconds it will not be billed at all However if the call was made for 20 or more seconds it will be charged for the full call duration Add duration This feature is similar to the relative surcharge discussed earlier but works in a different way The main disadvantage of post call surcharges is that the time charged does not correspond to the officially quoted price per minute For instance if you ate using 30 second rounding a 0 10 min rate and a 10 post call surcharge and the customer makes a call for 4 minutes and 52 seconds he will be charged 10 30 60 0 10 10 0 55 However on the CDR this will be represented as charged time 5 00 minutes 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 36 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts charged amount 0 55 which might lead to a dispute since you have quoted the customer a rate of 0 10 min The Add duration feature allows you to increase the call duration before any other charges are applied so it will look as if the call was actually made for the longer duration Thus taking the example above what will happen if we replace the
134. oncepts Number translation on your network Below is an illustration of how different translation rules are applied during a call Porta ij Billing 100 customer rate amp routing connection dialing rule lookup outgoing rule 0042021234567 42021234567 gt 01142021234567 AUTHORIZATION ROUTING 0042021234567 IP address 1 2 3 4 01142021234567 Porta SIP 0042021234567 1 01142021234567 G Number inside of your Carrier VolP is represented as gog RZ 42021234567 AB Customer s IP Phone Cell Phone 1 The customer dials a phone number on his SIP phone He enters the number in the same format he uses on his conventional phone i e 0042021234567 2 The number is delivered to the PortaSIP server and translated using the customer s dialing rule which states that the international dialing prefix for this customer is 00 So the number becomes 42021234567 E 164 format This number is used to search for the customet s rate for this destination 3 PortaSIP then requests routing for this number Carrier ABC is defined for terminating calls to the Czech Republic in PortaBilling However this carrier requires the number to be in US dialing format so the international number must be prefixed by 011 An outgoing translation rule s 011 to carrier ABC has been defined and is now applied to the phone number with the result 01142021234567 Note that there may be several carriers who can terminate this call
135. oning server If you buy IP phones retail you will probably have to change the address of the provisioning server on every phone manually However if you place a large enough order with a specific vendor these settings can be pre configured by him so that you may deliver an IP phone directly to the end user without even unwrapping it IP Phone Inventory The IP phone directory allows you to keep track of IP devices SIP phones or adaptors which are distributed to your customers The MAC address parameter is essential for every IP phone which is to be automatically provisioned and so a corresponding entry must be created in the IP phone inventory 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 67 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts Follow me services The follow me feature allows you to receive calls even if your IP phone is offline at the moment You can specify several alternative destinations for a single destination number account Follow me is activated when e IP phone is offline not registered e IP phone replies with an error code i e the line is currently busy because you are making another call e No answer is received within a certain interval usually 20 seconds the phone may be online but nobody answers or there is a network outage For instance if you do not pick up your IP phone or the IP phone is unreachable due to a network error the call would be forwarded to your home phone i
136. only be used on the current machine MySQL ODBC 3 51 Driver DSN Configuration V ed This dialog helps you in configuring the ODBC Data Source Name that you can use to connect to MySQL server DSN Information Data Source Name PortaBiling Description Portabiling database gt MySQL Connection Parameters E Host Server Namefor IP porabiingslave Database Name fpotabiing M y S QU User ferons Password pee Port if not 3306 jaor SQL command on connect o Cancel Options gt gt Test Data Source Help Important parameters include e Host Server Name or IP hostname or IP address of your slave server e Database Name porta billing e User Password username and password of the MySQL user you have created for reporting purposes e Port the port on which the database service is accessible enter 3307 here Note This port number differs from the one used by default 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 112 PORTA K Billing1 00 How to Using ODBC F Microsoft Access File Edit View Insert Tools Window Help ioe aleaer saealo q 00 cS o3 a Q db1 Database Access 2000 file format oven D Desion ggNew X 2a Ele Create table in Design view Create table by using wizard Create table by entering data Select Data Source File Data Source Machine Data Source Data Source Name dBASE Files Excel Files M
137. only works for a routing model in which the VoIP node e g PortaSIP requests billing for routing information If your gateway uses dial peers or an external gatekeeper for routing then you must configure number translation there Connection based translation rules When the call has been terminated to the vendor in a vendor specific format it will be reported to billing in this same format e g 7834 42021234567 Now it is necessary to convert this number to the proper format for billing 4202134567 which may be done using connection translation rules These rules will be applied to all calls which go through a given connection even those routed there using dial peers ot other external tools Node based translation rules These serve the purpose of converting a number from a custom format used by the customer into billing s internal format during authorization depending on the gateway For example on a gateway in Prague Czech Republic there may be the translation rule strip leading 00 while on a gateway in Moscow Russia the rule will be strip leading 810 or replace leading 8 with 7 Since customer based translation rules were introduced node based translation has become obsolete Therefore a node based translation rule is applied only if there is no customer based translation rule defined for a given customer 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 63 PORTA Billing100 System C
138. ons The different types of Connections are categorized as e VoIP to Vendor PSTN to Vendor outgoing calls e VoIP from Vendor PSTN from Vendor incoming calls Sometimes two entities are confused e The vendor who delivers calls from your customers to your network providing you with a toll fee line or DIDs this is a VoIP or PSTN from vendor connection e The vendor who sends calls from his customers to your network for termination in this case he is just another one of your customers and not a vendor 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 79 PORTA Billing 100 Entering Data in PortaBilling100 Step 5 Vendors and Customers Part II Vendor Node Your network Vendor Resellers Customers are logical entities in the system which will be charged for the calls they make and for whom invoices will be generated They may be termination partners resellers of a service or a virtual customer used to keep track of prepaid cards distributed by the Company A Retail Customer is an abstraction which groups a number of Accounts together This could be for example a company with an account for each employee The company will be invoiced for all phone usage and PortaBilling will charge it for this total with the company being able to see details of usage for each account Retail customers may belong directly to the owner of the system direct custo
139. or Direct Customers Step 2 Nodes The Network is defined as all network elements or Nodes that belong to the Company Gateways in the Company s network are trusted gateways These gateways must be listed in the Nodes registry and are also required to be Radius clients so that PortaBilling may receive accounting information 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 71 PORTA K Billing 100 Entering Data in PortaBilling100 Step 3 Vendors and Resellers Customers eae q Vendor Vendors are those partners which provide VoIP traffic termination services to the Company If the Company sends traffic to another service provider then in this case the other entity is defined as a Vendor Therefore if there is bilateral traffic between the Company and another firm the second firm must be registered as both a Vendor and a Customer 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 718 PORTA K Billing 100 Entering Data in PortaBilling100 Step 4 Connections Vendor A Connection is a precise description of a point of contact between the Company s Network and the Vendor s It is the point at which costing occurs and revenue is generated There may be multiple Connections to the same Vendor and each may for example have a different price All calls within the Company s network are free as they do not utilize Vendor Connecti
140. or example you could create a subscription which offers free setvice for the first three months a rate of 19 99 for the next nine months and 12 99 thereafter or something even more complex Applying subscriptions Since a product defines the way you provide a service to the end user and subscriptions define the charges for this service it is obvious that the two must be interconnected There is now a new property of products the subscription list that defines which subscription plans are to be included in a given product For instance your EasyCall product may only include one subscription plan e g SIP calling 9 99 while the SmartCall product might include SIP calling 9 99 Voicemail 1 99 and Follow me 0 99 A SmartCall customer will be charged 12 97 in total but there will be three separate invoice lines one for each subscription plan Thus when an account is assigned the SmartCall product three subscription records are created for it SmartCall Voicemail and Follow me while only one subscription record is created for an account with the EasyCall product These subscription records not to be confused with 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 41 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts subscription plans reflect the subscription s actual status with regard to this account Products Accounts Subscription plans 12060000001 SIP Calls Sub
141. ortaBilling are to be represented you can use our visual WYSIWYG layout editor Returning to the vendors in our example above we can create one template for each of them and associate them with certain tariffs Thus a corresponding template will automatically be used whenever you upload data for a given tariff For more details about templates see the PortaBilling Templates Guide Translation rules It is very often the case that you must make use of strange numbering systems on your VoIP network For example Vendor A requires you to send all phone numbers with the technical prefix 12345 Vendor B requires that all phone numbers be in the format 011 lt country code gt lt area code gt lt number gt and finally when you send calls to the local telecom Vendor C you have to strip the country code and area code off completely Of course you would like to have this information in a unified format in your billing so you will not need to enter multiple phone prefixes for the same destination PortaBilling translation rules allow you to convert a phone number from a non standard format to a unified one A translation rule is a set of Perl regular expressions which are applied to the Called Station Id phone number before any other processing in billing takes place NOTE A detailed description of Perl regular expressions is outside the scope of this document If you want to learn more about regular expressions abilities syntax and
142. ossary abbreviations list A AAA Authentication Authorization and Accounting A suite of network security services that provides the primary framework through which you can set up access control on your router or access server ACD Automated Call Distribution AD Abbreviated Dialing ADSL Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line AIS automated Information System ANI Automatic Number Identification API Application Programming Interface ART Audible Ringing Tone AS Answer Supervision ASP Application Service Provider ASR Automated Speech Recognition ATA Analog Telephone Adapter AVVID Architecture for Voice Video and Integrated Data B B2B Business to Business B2C Business to Consumer BH Busy Hour BHCA Busy Hour Call Attempts BHCC Busy Hour Call Completion 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 1 26 PORTA Billing1 00 Maintenance BIOS Basic Input Output System bps Bits per Second Bps Bytes per Second C call leg A link or hop along the route from the calling party to the destination called party CALEA Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act CDR Call Detail Record CGI Common Gateway Interface CHAP Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol CLE Customer Located Equipment CLEC Competitive Local Exchange Carrier CLI Command Line interface CLI CLID Calling Line Ide
143. ou create a tariff with the Routing type a few more fields will be added to rates in that tariff e Route category you can split this into categories such as Premium Cheap etc and use these categories in routing plans e Preference routing priority 0 10 higher values mean higher priority 0 means do not use this rate for routing at all e Huntstop signals that no routes with a lower preference should be considered 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 5 8 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts This allows you to easily manage both termination costs and routing from a single location on the web interface Thus when such a routing tariff is associated with a connection you can send calls for termination to all prefixes for which rates exist in the tariff Multiple routes It is dangerous to have only one termination partner if it is down your customers will not be able to make any calls Normally you will try to find several vendors and enter their rates into the system Each connection to a vendor with routing tariff will produce one possible route and PortaBilling will arrange these according to cost or your other preferences thus providing fail over routing Routing plans Routing preferences in the rate allow you to specify that for example you would rather send a call to MCI than to T Systems However this decision is global and so will apply to all calls made
144. p a follow me number to India this number will not be usable If multiple follow me numbers have been defined each one will be authorized independently So if B currently has 1 available and this is enough to make a 5 minute call to the Czech Republic or a 3 minute call to Russia the call will be automatically disconnected after 5 or 3 minutes respectively 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 6 8 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts Follow me vs redirect number What is the difference between the follow me and redirect number properties of an account Both seem to serve a similar purpose However redirect numbers which appeared quite some time ago had several drawbacks e Different gateways applications had different kinds of support for this feature For instance the default Cisco debit card application did not support this feature at all e Using only a single phone number as a parameter did not allow flexible services For this reason a new flexible robust solution was required and so the follow me feature was implemented in PortaSwitch The redirect number feature is now obsolete and information in the redirect number field is no longer used by PortaSwitch PortaBilling still returns the value of the redirect number in the h323 redirect number RADIUS attribute for backward compatibility so it can still be used by some external applications e g TCL script on Cisco gateway Online
145. porting DOM and with JavaScript enabled Spreadsheet processor MS Excel Display settings o Minimum screen resolution 1024 x 768 o Color palette 16 bit color minimum NOTE To view downloaded CSV Comma Separated Values files in Windows please do the following to match PortaBilling s default list separator My Computer gt Control Panel gt Regional Settings gt Number gt List Separator type 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 5 PORTA Billing100 PortaBilling Administrator Guide Installation PortaBilling100 is provided via a jump start installation CD This CD contains installation media for FreeBSD 6 0 stable branch with the latest security bug fixes supplementary packages necessary for convenient system administration and maintenance and PortaBilling software packages PortaBilling installation and configuration are automated and integrated within the main installation process This allows you to install a completely functional PortaBilling environment two servers from scratch in less than one hour For detailed installation instructions please refer to the PortaBilling100 Installation Guide What s new in Maintenance Release 12 This release includes several new features and improvements e Subscription module for flexible management of service plans and features as well as applying charges for their use e Changes in the invoicing module new billing cycl
146. practices you can read Perl Regular Expressions Quick Start run perldoc perlrequick or Perl Regular Expressions Tutorial run perldoc perlretut We also recommend the book Mastering Regular Expressions by J effrey Friedl published by O Reilly ISBN 1556592 257 3 A translation rule is a set of s regexp s individual regexp s are separated by a semi colon The initial value is inside of the _ variable and the result is considered to be the value found in _ after the last regexp has been evaluated For example here is a translation rule which will remove an initial double zero international dialing code and also convert local numbers ones starting with a single zero into the E 164 format s 00 s 0 420 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 55 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts Three types of translation rules e Connection translation rules These are related to a particular connection and convert a phone number from a unified format into a vendor specific one during the routing phase or from a vendor specific format into a unified one during the call billing phase e Node translation rules also called authorization translation tules These are used to convert phone numbers from an IVR specific format into a unified one during the authorization phase Example On your gateway A an IVR is running for prepaid cards You use E 164 numbering in billing so you expect all numb
147. r Accounts Web interface Merchant account A merchant account must be opened at a bank Its purpose is similar to that of a normal checking account It stores funds you have received from credit card payments Online payment processor A merchant account is usually enough to start processing credit card payments via charge slips However if you wish to initiate transactions from your own server via the Internet this service is provided by online payment processors such as Authorize Net You establish an account with an online payment processor providing it with your merchant account information and in return you receive credentials username password etc for using its API So now your application can connect to the APPs server and upon providing valid authentication information initiate transactions Business OnlinePayment framework Unfortunately there are many different online payment processors most of them using their own API which is different from that of other providers So it seems that every e commerce application such as 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 59 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts PortaBilling100 must be programmed to support them all which is an extremely laborious task Fortunately there is a solution Business OnlinePayment is a framework which provides the necessary middleware between e commerce applications and online payment processors e The application i
148. rameter so that cheaper routes will be among the first ones or in random fashion Does PortaSwitch support LCR Yes we support LCR and much more besides In fact just LCR is the simplest type of routing PortaSwitch handles If you decide not to use routing plans one default plan for everyone or routing preferences same preference for all vendors then the routing decision will be affected solely by the vendot s cost Compare the two illustrations below The first one shows simple least cost routing all of the available carriers are arranged according to cost In the second illustration PortaSwitch routing preferences are used so that the administrator can re arrange the routing In this case carrier D has been moved down the routing list while carrier A has been moved up to the top of the list thus becoming the first route 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 60 PORTA K Billing1 00 System Concepts WH Test Dialplan gt Close 4E Objects gt Logout p Protocol Date and Time Phone Number Routing Plan H323 SIP YYYY MM DD HH Mi 8610234567 Default v v lI Search Destination Country Description Price Route Category Preference Huntstop Route to Vendor Connection Tariff 1 86 CHINA Proper 0 02500 USD Default 5 N 45 12 156 200 Vendor D Termination to vendor D Vendor D 2 86 CHINA Proper 0 03000 USD Default 5 N ny gw 01 Vendor C Termination to carrier Vendor El 86
149. rect number feature Each account in PortaBilling has an associated number field If this field is not empty PortaBilling will include an h323 redirect number in each authentication confirm message and use an h323 return code of 52 How to proceed in this case is determined by the gateway The account owner is allowed to modify the associated number using the customer self provisioning web To implement a simple call forwarding service authenticate by DNIS and then forward the call to a number defined in the properties of the DNIS account you may use PortaOne Advanced Remote Authenticate script Customer support number PortaBilling allows you to enter the redirect number during the process of account generation so that you may specify different redirect numbers for different account batches Different batches may be distributed in different regions and only a slight modification to the prepaid card script will make it more intelligent in terms of choosing a customer support center IP telephony private line auto ringdown In the case of a combination of ANI CLD authentication and immediate call forwarding you may map phone lines from one world region to another This is advantageous in that you will require only one local access number Mapping is dependant on ANI CLI Configure an outgoing connection to a vendor when sending calls using a gatekeeper so that the remote IP address is not known in advance In this situatio
150. rforming the action described in the paragraph Tips provide information that might help you solve a problem 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 4 PORTA Billing100 PortaBilling Administrator Guide Hardware and software requirements Server System Recommendations 2 two UNIX Servers for Billing and for Web Interface Both servers host the database thus increasing system reliability A minimum of 60 GB of available disk space On the average 200 000 CDRs take up about 1 GB of disk space this includes database files indexes and binary logs raw Radius detail files billing engine log files and other related information RAID is recommended to improve performance and reliability A processor running at 2 8 GHz or greater Additional processor speed is needed for networks with a high call volume At least 512MB of RAM 1 GB recommended At least one USB port For additional details and configuration advice see the Hardware Recommendations topic on our forum http forum portaone com index php showtopic 3 For information about whether particular hardware is supported by FreeBSD from the JumpStart Installation CD consult the related document on the FreeBSD website http www freebsd org doc en_US 1SO8859 1 books faq hardware html Client System Recommendations OS Windows 95 XP UNIX or Mac OS X Browser Internet Explorer 6 0 or higher Netscape 7 2 Mozilla 1 7 ot higher sup
151. rive HTML Hypertext Markup Language HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol ICMP Internet Control Message Protocol IM Instant Messaging IMAP Internet Message Access Protocol IMS IP Multimedia Subsystem IOS Internetworking Operating System IP PBX Internet Protocol Private Branch Exchange ISDN Integrated Services Digital Network ISP Internet Service Provider ISV Independent Software Vendor ISDP Internet Telephony Service Provider IVM Instant Voice Messaging IVR Interactive Voice Response IXC Inter Exchange Carrier J JMS Java Messaging Service JVM Java Virtual Machine L LAN Local Area Network LBS Location Based Services LCR Least Cost Routing LDAP Lightweight Directory Access Protocol LEC Local Exchange Carrier Long pound calls see Mu t session call M MAC Media Access control 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 128 PORTA Billing100 Maintenance MAC address physical address of the device on Ethernet MG Media Gateway MGCP Media Gateway Control Protocol MIME Multi Purpose Internet Mail Extension MMS Multimedia Messaging Service MOD Movies on Demand Multi session call A call in which for the same incoming call to the IVR you can make several outgoing calls to different destinations N NANP North American Numbering Plan NAT Network Address Translation N
152. rta httpd conf uncomment the section about the virtual host for online signup by default it runs on port 8500 e Create a validation module or use the one provided with PortaBilling By customizing the validation module you can implement the advanced restrictions you require e g allow creation of accounts with a balance of 10 20 or 50 dollars only or ensure that lifetime is no more than 180 days Place this module somewhere on the web server so that it will be accessible for mod_perl for example in usr local lib perl5 site_perl Thus if you decided to name your module My PortaValidation Reseller ABC the actual program code would reside in usr local lib perl5 site_perl My PortaValidation Reselle rABC pm NOTE Make sure that you restart the web server apachect1 restart after making changes in the module Create a reseller Create a set of tariffs and products managed by this reseller Fill in the form on the Product Web Subscription Tab Login to the customer self provisioning interface and enter the merchant account data Company Info gt Merchant Account tab Edit EasyCall Product gt fel Save fe Save amp Close Close Rate Lookup gt I Logout Product Name EasyCall Currency USD Managed By Reseller ABC General Info Accessibility Notepad HTTP_REFERER https www mydomain com subscribe action asp Validation Module My
153. rtaBilling creates an account and redirects the browser using Continue URL e Each time the browser is redirected using Continue URL PortaBilling provides a comprehensive set of parameters List of Continue URL parameters and possible values status OR ERROR message CC rejected e session_id unique session ID supplied by the web subscription server e account_id generated account ID Sample files These can be found on your PortaBilling installation in the following directories porta admin apache subscription subscription html porta admin apache subscription subscription_result html porta admin site_lib Porta Subscription pm An online web signup HTML form can be found at the following URL https myPortaBilling myCompany com 8500 subscription html where myPortaBilling myCompany com is the URL of yout PortaBilling Web Interface and 8500 is the port on which the subscription virtual host is running 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 119 PORTA Billing100 Maintenance Maintenance 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 1 90 PORTA Billing100 Maintenance Configuration files There ate two separate configuration files one for the billing engine master server and one for the web interface slave server Billing engine The configuration file is called porta billing conf and is located
154. rved www portaone com 7 PORTA Billing 100 System Concepts 1 system Concepts 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 8 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts Basic idea PortaBilling100 is essentially a mediation software It communicates with your VoIP network provides your gateways with authentication or authorization and collects data about calls being carried out It creates the CDRs Call Detail Records for completed calls giving general information about each call such as source and destination number plus billing information Termination Termination partner A partner B os Bank Online payment processor l red Porta i Billing Administrator all interface Residential IP YA Admin Web P Self care a ANI DNIS Termination Pre paid cards A Callback to PSTN Customized IVR Porta Ks UM Unified Messaging End U Zi ALS EA j isi ea a gt K q la l Phone amp Web E i Interface Call legs Billing is done based on the information provided by the elements of your VoIP network gateways SIP server and so on This information is supplied to the billing as accounting records Usually the gateway treats incoming and outgoing calls as two separate entities i e call legs Each of the call legs produces a separate accounting record so that for instance billing receives 4 accounting requests in case of a classic VoIP
155. rver etc When the customet s account is closed no further activities at his account be it calls subscription fees self care access or other are available 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 50 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts Collection process Closing Time 7 lt gt Grace period Suspension Time i S i l IFN N i l i Invoice Due Suspension The date date date End e Upon the end of the billing period an invoice is generated 1 e If the invoice has a positive amount due it is considered unpaid While invoice is in the unpaid status the customer may be reminded of the approaching due date 2 e On the due date the unpaid invoice turns overdue 3 e Several collection attempts may be made attempts to charge the customer s credit card on file for the amount due 4 e The customer may be reminded that the invoice is overdue 5 and the service may be suspended soon 6 e On the suspension date the customer s status changes to suspended 7 which automatically blocks his access to services e If the payment issue is not resolved the customer s account is closed on the closing date 8 Payments PortaBilling100 allows payments to be processed online without the intervention of an operator by charging the customer s credit card or debiting his bank account Payments may be initiated by 1 Your subscribers from the
156. s 4 Create accounts with an Account ID identical to the phone number from which the service is to be used TIP Check in which format ANI CLI numbers are reported by your Cor gateway For example the phone number 42021234567 might be reported as 21234567 021234567 or something different You must use exactly the same format for the Account ID or change your application so as to convert it to the desired format Only one extra item is required in the application configuration for PortaOne s Advanced Remote Authenticate the translate parameter The following example assumes that phone numbers arrive in the local format prefixed by 0 e g 021234567 instead of 42021234567 call application voice ani translate 0 420 Bill customers who are connected via T1 E1 directly to a port on my gateway Typically you do not use authentication or authorization for such port based billing since you are always sure that your customer is on the other end of the physical line Although it might be a good idea to implement call authorization so that you can control which destinations the customer is allowed to call to we will not discuss this here For port based billing you need only do the following 1 For each such customer create a tariff that you want to use to bill the customer and a product Only one row in Accessibility is necessary with the node ANY and the tariff you have created 2 Now you
157. s e For any data mining solutions extracting data from the database use only the slave database e Use a tool like Crystal Reports Microsoft Access or some custom application to retrieve data from the database process it and submit it to the user Use ODBC to connect to PortaBilling ODBC Open Database Connectivity provides a way for client programs to access a wide range of databases or data sources If you need extended customized reporting not available in PortaBilling you can do this using external tools such as MS Access or Crystal Reports Create a MySQL user to be used for reports 1 Login into your Portabilling slave server using ssh 2 Start the MySQL command tool andrew demo home porta adminSmysql u root mysql Reading table information for completion of table and column names You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with A Welcome to the MySQL monitor Commands end with or g Your MySQL connection id is 42122 to server version 4 0 17 log Type help or h for help Type c to clear the buffer mysql gt 3 Create a new user using the GRANT command mysql gt grant ALL PRIVILEGES on porta billing to reports 192 168 0 5 identified by pod23uk Query OK 0 rows affected 0 02 sec mysql gt 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 108 PORTA K Billing1 00 How to NOTE The command above will per
158. s from the catalog of items you have created above Also each data file will contain only some of the items i e those which are provided by this particular supplier The next step is to create similar price lists but with the prices you will apply to your customers Of course you might have several such price lists e g one for retail customers another for business customers another for resellers and so on Every data file will contain all of the items you offer to this category of customers including prices Now let s come back to the VoIP business The catalog of items corresponds to destinations in PortaBilling Every destination is similar to an item description in the catalog i e it provides general information e g 420 Czech Republic proper 420602 Czech Republic mobile and so on The price list for vendor or customer is equal to a tariff in PortaBilling The price list includes all items the customer may purchase and all destinations the customer can make calls to All tariffs are identical in structure but some of them will be used to calculate your costs vendor tariffs while others will be used to charge your customers A single line item in the price list is equivalent to a rate in PortaBilling It gives the price per minute and other rating parameters for a specific destination Therefore the standard sequence for setting up your service is as follows Define the destinations you will use in your bu
159. s provided with unified API methods e g doTransaction so the same code in the application can be used to communicate with any online payment processor e A communication plugin is created for each online payment processor This plugin knows such specific parameters as the server s address the correct way of encoding transaction parameters the proper way of parsing the server s response and so on On the application side therefore only a few things are required loading the correct plugin and invoking a transaction method After that control is handed over to the plugin which handles all communication with the remote server The whole Business OnlinePayment project is open source and is maintained by a large team of individuals At the moment about 10 different plugin modules are supplied with PortaBilling and it is easy to create new plugins for online payment processors You can find more information about the Business OnlinePayment module and available plugins at http www cpan org modules by module Business PortaBilling payment support PortaBilling stores required information such as customer name and address credit card number and so on in the database Multiple merchant accounts are supported for instance your merchant account A accepts payments in USD while account B takes payments in euros You may define a minimum allowed payment and a list of supported card types VISA MC etc for every mercha
160. scriptions 9 99 EasyCall i SIP Calls 1 99 0 99 SmartCall 12060000002 i Subscriptions Voicemail Follow me Subscriptions which an account receives as part of its product are called mandatory subscriptions because it is not possible to remove or cancel these subscriptions so long as the account uses the product You may however add some optional subscriptions to an account e g if an EasyCall product user wishes to receive the Voicemail service These optional subscriptions can be added or canceled as you wish You can also assign subscriptions to a specific customer Here the procedure is exactly the same as with an account Since a customer cannot have a product assigned directly to him there are no mandatory subscriptions in this case i e all of a customer s subscriptions are optional Every subscription has parameters such as activation date cancellation date and most importantly the billed to date which defines the period for which subscription fees have already been charged Activating a subscription By default a subscription is automatically activated when its start time arrives with one exception Namely in the subscription plan properties you may specify that the subscription will become active only when the account is used for the first time In this case the subscription is activated either on the start date or the account s date of first use whichever comes later Can
161. siness Basically you will need to define every unique prefix used by your vendors an easy way to do this is by using PortaBilling s default destination set and PortaBilling templates Create a tariff for every vendor using the rate list they supply Create a tariff for every customer product Once again note that each tariff may contain a different set of destinations For instance the tariff for your vendor ABC may contain different rates for 420 0 10 min 4202 0 09 min and 420602 0 18 min But you can just list a single rate for your customer in the tariff i e 420 0 20 min 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 99 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts Relationship between tariffs and destination group sets As mentioned before multiple destination group sets may be defined in the system with some destination groups e g CZ Mobile defined for each of them So when you enter a new rate for CZ Mobile in a specific tariff which destination group definition should be used To avoid such ambiguities you will assign a destination group set for every tariff which will be used to create new rates if you do not assign a destination group set to the tariff then you can only enter rates for individual prefixes Thus when you attempt to create a new rate for destination group CZ Mobile the following sequence of events takes place e PortaBilling locates the definition of the CZ Mobile destination
162. sions associated with a vendor connection for rates matching this phone number In each tariff the best matching rate is chosen this rate will define the routing parameters e A list of possible termination addresses will be produced this will include the remote IP addresses for VoIP connections and IP addresses of your own nodes with telephony connections e This list will be sorted according to routing plan routing preference and cost entries after the first huntstop will be ignored e A list of these IP addresses with optional login and password for SIP authentication will be returned to the SIP server To avoid extremely long delays only a certain number of routes from the beginning of the list are returned the default is 15 but this can be changed in porta billing conf Route sorting How exactly does PortaBilling100 arrange multiple available routes 1 By route category Only route categories which are included in the routing plan will be used following the order given in the routing plan 2 Ifyou have multiple route categories within the routing plan you can either merge them into the same group by assigning them the same order value or keep each one separate with its own order value Then routes within the same order group of route categories will be arranged according to preference 3 For routes with the same preference the system can arrange them according to cost a comparison is made on the Price_Next rate pa
163. ss of the call cost However the volume discount plans which were introduced in Maintenance Release 10 allow you to accomplish the same and much more so that volume based tariffs are now discontinued 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 30 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts Cost based billing Peak and off peak prices It is possible to have two different sets of prices for peak and off peak time By default everything is considered to be peak time A call will be billed the off peak rate only if it begins and ends within the off peak period For example if the off peak period covers the time from 8 pm until 8 am and the call started at 7 50 am and lasted for 13 minutes it will be billed at the peak rate This default behavior can be changed using the parameter in porta billing conf and thereafter only the call start time will be used to select peak off peak rates Off peak periods are defined using the powerful and flexible Time Period module An Off peak Period Wizard is also available allowing you to perform period definition in an easy way See the PortaBilling100 Administrator Guide manual for more details Charging calls the traditional method This method of charging calls was used up until Maintenance Release 9 With Maintenance Release 9 a new more flexible rating formula has been made available see the next section however the traditional method is still fully supported for bac
164. sssnsesssessesssessecssneeees 82 Using different protocols SIP ANd H323 uo cccsccssesssesssessessessessecsesseesseeees 83 Statistics and Monitoring Tools ccceseeees 84 Billing Server health monitoring occ cscs sessscssessecssecssessecssessecssesseesseesseesee 85 VoIP network performance statistics oe eeceecssssssssscsssssseecsecsssccsssesseseeseeeses 87 Billing StatistiC Snan aaa 90 HOW UO ivi siciiicsivcscrtscinniienisiiciaiinniininivaitentndin 95 Login into PortaBilling after the installation cssesseesseeseestecseeeseeees 96 Charge my calling card customers XX min extra when they call a toll free MG ss airain a E sesissdssiseasin RA E TE 96 Authorize and bill my customers by the phone number they are calling from ANl based billing occ ccsecsseessecssesssessecssecssesssessssssecsuecsecsecesecesessseesees 97 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 9 PORTA Billing100 PortaBilling Administrator Guide Bill customers who are connected via T1 E1 directly to a port on my GAL CWAY oa eecceescsssesssssccssecssnsccsssecssnsccessesssusccsssecesusscssssccsssecssssesessecssisecessecesasecssssccenees 98 Authenticate and bill my customers by the IP address of their gateway E E EE EE AE E E A E E esecGvarvesven E E E 100 Charge a reseller for incoming calls ou cecessesseesseessesseesstecseessecstecseeeseesseess 101 Deal with technical prefixes and numbering formats 102 Locate the h323 conf id f
165. stance you bill by 6 second intervals the total call duration will be higher than the actual duration of the calls Vendor CDRs It is very useful to have a detailed list of calls for a specific vendor in case of disputes over the amount of terminated traffic These statistics are calculated daily and are split into files according to the vendor s billing period Yao a Vendor reports 41 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 2 i 8 1921 DB BAB HAB AM an Feb 2006 Mo TuWe ThFr SaSu 5 12345 667s 9 7 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 46 14 15 16 17 18 19 TANDBAB AA BBD Mar 2006 Mo TuWe ThFr Sa Su 9 12345 10 6 7 3 9 10 11 12 11 43 14 15 16 17 18 19 50 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 51 19 2 21 2 2425 52 8 ABADA Apr 2006 Mo Tu We ThFr Sa Su 13 12 143456782 gt Close Objects oN Logout Search Download Options 7 Pages 1 2 3 4 nal ae a aa Jun 2005 Jul 2005 Aug 2005 Sep 2005 Vendor E MoTuWeThFrSaSu MoTuWeThFrSaSu MoTuWeThFrSaSu MoTuWeThFrSaSu Vendor F 22 12345 2 12331234567 35 1234 Vietnam FreeCall 3 6FS9MNW 745K TSIM 2 SEINNNBH 6 56 TS 9M VoIP solutions 24 13 14 15 16 MF 18 19 28 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 33 5 16 MF 18 19 20 21 37 12 13 14 15 16 M7 18 Scrennination SMARBAHA 29 SIHMARBA MBHBAHBBHAB 38 19021228345 aaa 26 Bw 30 BHA BWMHN 35 WH 39 HA BAD XTen Y Termination Oct 2005 Nov 2005 Dec 2005 Jan 2006 acer MoTuWeThFrSaSu MoTuWeThFrSaSu MoTuWeThFrSaSu MoTuWeThFrSaSu Moenen M 39 124 123456 s 1234
166. t does it show the most popular destinations or the customers who make the most calls Several types of reports are already supplied with PortaBilling including e Most popular destinations of a specific customer e Total amount of minutes and charges for a specific customer Other types of reports can be developed on request When a new report object is uploaded to your system a new type of report will appear Report type defines 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 71 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts e What types of input parameters are required by the report e g customer name time interval etc e What the output values of this report are Since the report results are displayed as a table this defines what the columns represent in this table while every row in the table represents another line of report data Report query Whereas report type defines a report s general characteristics e g Most popular destinations by executing a report query you may obtain a specific result e g What were the most popular destinations for customer John in the last two weeks Sometimes you will simply execute a query once for instance you would like to quickly verify that a particular customer did indeed make more than 1 000 calls yesterday while other types of queries will be made routinely e g every morning your sales manager checks the previous day s statistics for his VIP c
167. tan IP address attempts to sign up as a customer with a US billing and shipping address Tf the validation check fails the user s web browser is redirected to the initial signup page with the error code passed as a parameter Thus he will see the same web pages as before with a message explaining the error and may be given a chance to re enter his information 6 PortaBilling contacts the online payment processor to charge the customer credit card for the required amount If the transaction fails e g invalid card number no funds available the user is once again redirected to the initial signup page 7 At this stage new customer and account objects are created in the database this may involve allocating a new phone number for the account from among those available Optional actions e g enter a record to the provisioning database that a certain IP phone 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 70 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts must be shipped to the customer via FedEx UPS may also be done at this point 8 The user is redirected to the web signup front end with important service attributes e g assigned phone number password etc being passed as parameters This request is processed by the front end site s signup successful script and the user sees a page informing him that the signup process has been completed and providing further information about the service e g his phone number
168. te of the billing period e Invoice date date when the invoice was generated e Due date date by which payment should be received e Payment terms description of payment terms e g due on receipt e Invoice total sum of all charges in this period minus credits refunds e Invoice amount due amount the customer is supposed to pay you see below for a detailed explanation of invoice balances e Invoice payment status this specifies the following o Do Not Pay invoice amount is 0 no payment is requited o Unpaid no payment has been received yet o Partially Paid payment has been received but in an amount less than the amount due o Paid invoice has been paid in full o Overdue invoice is unpaid and past due o N A payment status is not applicable to this invoice Invoices also contain certain data extracted from other PortaBilling objects which are included in the invoice s PDF version e Information about the customer invoice recipient e Information about the invoice issuer your company or a reseller if the invoice was issued on behalf of a reseller e Information about calls and other transactions included in the invoice Invoice balance PortaBilling provides two methods for computing the invoice balance amount due e Simple In this case the invoice s amount due is equal to the invoice total and is calculated as the sum of all charges during the given period no previous payments ar
169. test Consequently even if PortaBilling participates in the process it remains invisible to the end user The user accesses the web front end fills in the required information clicks Sign up and then after a short pause is shown either a Congratulations or Sorry there was an error page on the same web portal Custom reports If your business process requires that specific information from PortaBilling be presented in a certain format e g your marketing department needs to know the top 10 countries based solely on calls longer than 15 minutes including the ratio between these calls and all other calls for each country and this information is not available among PortaBilling s default reports then there are two options available e Create your own custom report using tools such as Crystal Reports for more details see the How to section This assumes that you have sufficient experience with relational databases and reporting tools e Contact the PortaOne team so that a custom report can be developed for you and uploaded to your system In this case no technical knowledge on your side is required PortaBilling s custom report module allows the creation of report objects which can later be uploaded to your system and then executed by your administrators In this way you can maintain an unlimited number of different reports specific to your business Report type Report type defines the purpose of a repor
170. than 5 is not representative for ASR calculating ASR is calculated as the number of type 5 calls divided by the total number of calls The result is shown as a percentage value multiplied by 100 Relative setup time calculations Relative setup time is calculated as the ratio between the total setup time of all calls during the given period and the maximum value in seconds capacity 900sec ASR statistics Follow the ASR link from the Statistics section in the main menu 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 88 PORTA K Billing1 00 uaaa Statistics and Monitoring Tools Vendor ASR reports gt Close Custom Query Objects gt Logout Vendor E Vendor F Vietnam FreeCall VoIP solutions Termination xTen Y Termination YYCEnterprises Itd Zrouting NC_Vendor1 Download Options V Jun 2005 Jul 2005 Aug 2005 gt Sep 2005 MoTuWeThFrSaSu MoTuWeThFrSaSu MoTuWeThFrSaSu MoTuWe ThFrSaSu 22 ieee 26 A203 Si Rees PARSE Re 35 ot 2 3 id 23 6 7 8 91011 12 24 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 25 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 26 27 28 29 30 gt Oct 2005 Mo TuWe ThFr Sa Su 39 Ad 3456789 41 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 42 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 43 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 431 gt Feb 2006 2745678910 28 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 29 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 30 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Nov 2005 Mo TuWe ThFr Sa Su 4 rt S ES WA ES IG 47 8 91011 12 13 46 14 15 16 17 18
171. tional periods Invoicing At the end of the billing period PortaBilling can produce an invoice for your customers An invoice reflects all the transactions calls payments refunds subscription charges and so on which occurred during this period and serves as the primary record of services provided to a specific customer as well as his current status Due date Due date Invoice Payment Invoice Payment 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 4 4 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts Billing periods A billing period defines how often invoices statements will be generated and when exactly they are to be produced PortaBilling100 supports the following billing periods e Daily Covers a 24 hour period e Weekly Covers a 7 day period Monday through Sunday e Bi weekly Covers a period from the 1 to the 15 or from the 16 to the last day of the month e Monthly Covers the period from the 1 of the month to the last day of the month e Monthly anniversary Covers the period from the Nth day of the month to the day before the Nth day of the following month N is the day of the month when the customer was created thus if a customer was created on Januaty 6 his invoices will always cover the period from the 6 of the current month to the 5 of the following month To avoid complications for customers who were created on the 29 30 or 31 day of the month their first bi
172. tor of the cards You can have many such customers if you use multiple distributors Even if you do not use distributors at all and sell all of your cards directly to end users it is still a good idea to create a separate customer object for this purpose so that these accounts will not be mixed with others For each call made by a credit account the customer s balance is charged for exactly the same amount by which the account was billed retail customer accounts must use the same currency as the customer This provides an easy way to track the total balance for a group of postpaid accounts in i in Customer A 0 CustomerA 2 Customer A Account 1 0 makes a call wu N for 2 Q k gt Account 2 0 Account 2 0 makes a call Account 2 3 for 3 NOTE If a call was made by a debit prepaid account this does not affect the retail OO customer s balance see below since prepaid accounts cards are normally paid for by your customer at the time of purchase This also allows your prepaid card 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 1 8 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts distributor to have postpaid accounts for example for internal office use and to be billed for them Or your postpaid customer with multiple IP phones can purchase additional prepaid cards for his temporary workers mn IA Customer A 5 Customer A 5 g Q ee fe Account 1 credit 2 Account 1 credit 2 Q Q Account 2
173. ually leave this parameter blank Life time and expiration date work in conjunction whichever comes earlier defines the end of service If an account expiration date is 01 Jan 2007 and the life time is 60 days and the account was first used on 9 Dec 2006 this account has only 23 days of service left and will expire on the 1 of January Another important note regarding the life time is that the voucher recharge operation extends the life cycle of an account So if an account has 60 days life time and 57 days after the first use the account owner makes a voucher recharge the service will extend for another 60 days and the date of the latest recharge will be the starting date of a new life time period 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 16 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts Products and accessibility A product is a combination of services that you provide to a customer for a price For example you decide to sell calling cards with 6 cents minute calls to the China for calls to a local access number in New York and 8 cents minute for calls to China made via a toll free line In this case your product will include two types of service e access via the local New York number and e access via the toll free line with price parameters associated with each service 1 212 1234567 Pre paid tariff Termination costs 0 05 min no incoming cost 86 0 06 min 86 10 654321 cae a ete ea ccec
174. ult method requires the prefix in the volume discount definition to be equal to the prefix which is used in tariff to rate this call ReplaceCliWithUserName no For outgoing calls make CLI to be equal to the authorization username obsolete with the introduction of the per account Force CLI setting in the call features Admin server and web interface The configuration file is called porta admin conf and is located in the home porta admin etc directory on the slave server It is automatically created by the installation program and populated with the initial configuration You might wish to edit it so that the system will better suit your needs porta admin conf 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 1 23 PORTA Billing1 00 Maintenance Global System_Name MyBilling Enter a distinctive name for your system here sendmail usr sbin sendmail ZIP usr local bin zip UNZIP usr local bin unzip TempDir var tmp porta maintainer PortaBilling lt porta 100 mybilling com gt What should be in the From field of outgoing emails Time_Zone America New_York Default time zone when creating new objects such as user customer etc Debug 0 Check_Age 2 Pager 30 How many entries per page should be shown in tables This is a master parameter and can be altered for individual forms Porta_Realm admin 443 accounts 8445 cc_staff 8446 customer 8444 vendor 8447 representative
175. ustomers To accommodate both types of needs PortaBilling allows you to create a new query and then e Run it once in your web browser to see the results immediately e Save the query including input parameters for later use When you need to re run the query sometime in the future you simply open and execute it i e you do not have to fill in any parameters This significantly reduces the time required to prepare complicated reports and allows you to minimize the chance of error The administrator creates the query just once and then inexperienced users need only execute it Also to save you time when preparing multiple similar reports PortaBilling allows you to create a query as a copy of another existing query After you have defined a complex report with many input parameters for customer A simply create a copy of it and change the customer name to B Now you have reports for both customers either of which can be executed with just one mouse click Query execution There ate several methods for executing a query and obtaining report results e You may request query execution from the PortaBilling web interface and see the result in your web browser e You may request that a query be executed in the background with the results delivered to you via email This is the preferred method for complicated reports involving large arrays of data since in this case PortaBilling can schedule query execution in such a way that it
176. will in effect create rates for each individual prefix Destination group sets In happens quite often that different partners will assign a different meaning to the same destination groups For instance your partner A says that CZ Mobile is 420602 420603 and 420737 but your partner B also considers prefix 420777 to be part of CZ Mobile So you will need to have two versions of CZ Mobile one for partner A and one for partner B In this situation you will create two separate destination group sets A and B as well as different destination groups inside those sets Rates A rate is a combination of billing parameters for a specific destination For example you can specify that calls to 420 are charged 0 09 USD min during peak time and 0 07 USD min during off peak time while calls to 420609 should not be allowed at all Tariffs A tariff is a complete set of rates for a specific account customer or vendor Thus it should include every possible destination to which you want to let him call It may be that the tariff will contain some prefixes that are part of more generic ones for example you will have a rate for the 420 prefix and for the 4202 prefix In this case the longest prefix match takes priority What happens if a destination is not included in the tariff and the customer tries to call there There are two possibilities o If outgoing calls are authorized via PortaBilling for example i
177. y master and assume control of your VoIP network Porta Billing 100 Standby Master Slave Web Interface Billing Engine a 2 E Standby DB LA A Billitag Engine hEN ET Master DB a a a 7 se a ZA Nir Slave DB a a a a 5 s Real time replication t Tay A ba EN e A N Ste The standby server may be installed in the same co location center even in the same rack as your primary master server This provides easy administration and in case of a switch from standby to master the standby server is able to simply take over the previous mastet s IP 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 1 9 PORTA Billing100 System Concepts address In such a case the change is transparent for all elements of your VoIP network However should your co location provider be having a problem with network connectivity both servers will become inaccessible to your VoIP network installed elsewhere This can be avoided by installing the standby server in a different physical location connected to a different network and preferably to a different ISP In that case even if the whole hosting center including your main server is down you can still continue network operations via the standby server since this will not be affected by the outage PortaBillingl00 web interface Different operations are available for different t
178. ypes of users who access the system also the abilities of an individual user can be adjusted via his access level settings In general administrators PortaBilling users can potentially perform all possible configuration tasks while others are limited to their own entity and related objects only For instance a reseller can access any of his sub customerts or their accounts while a sub customer can only access information about himself and his accounts on his self care pages The self care interface imposes multiple security related limitations on a uset s activity e g a sub customer can view his own balance on the self care pages but cannot modify it For improved security the PortaBilling100 web interface is divided into several separate areas each serving its own purpose Thus a login name and password which allow a user to access the customer self care interface cannot be used to log in to the admin interface the login name and password for the account s end user s self care interface are not applicable to customer self care and so forth 2000 2006 PortaOne I nc All rights Reserved www portaone com 13 PORTA K Billing1 00 Reseller self care Admin interface Manage rates Manage products Manage discount plans Create new accounts Create new customers Setup online payment processing View call View account Issue refund Troubleshoot Browse vendor CDRs See customer info Browse

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