On Feb 1, 2010, at 1:13 PM, Alex Balashov wrote:
On 02/01/2010 03:56 PM, Carlos Alvarez wrote:
On 2/1/10 1:49 PM, Colin wrote:
Maybe I misread the original post if your not worried about the cost what are you looking for?
The LCR system is all about cost. However in building it, logic says you find the absolutely most granular model possible, and build up from there. That's the theory anyway. Then, again in theory, all rate decks should fit into that model and you have neat and concise database queries.
Carlos, as long as you have confidence in all your carriers' willingness to complete a call to a given destination at a given price, I think the simplest strategy for you would be to generate a retail deck according to the most granular prefix available for every destination among all carriers in your LCR table. When two or more prefix/provider tuples are of equal prefix length, choose the highest one, the lowest one, or average them, or average them and then add a certain %.
It really just depends on how likely it is that a given carrier will not actually complete a call and you'll have to fall back to a much more expensive rate from the next-cheapest carrier.
I'd tend to agree with Alex - this is at least the most "cost- conservative" way to do it. However, if you're looking for a solution that is more complete, and has other bonuses, I'd suggest the "GDDS" product from Telcordia. Not only do you get a pretty good idea of both domestic and international route termination behaviors, but you can also do nifty things like put city names or service classes on your customer CDR/billing entries when all you have is the number they dialed. Often this is quite handy. It's costly, though - to be oblique, figure at least one MacBook per month, roughly. Price varies based on your usage model. Most critical in the data delivered by this service is the ability for them to tell you what is a "mobile" versus "non-mobile" termination number. When the cost difference is 10x or 20x, this makes a big difference in your routing engine. Carriers are known to be a bit "forgetful" about telling you what routes are billed at what rates. My favorite was a company (who shall remain nameless) who gave us rates for termination into the UK, but wouldn't give us actual route prefixes. "Oh, you have to figure that out on your own - the data is available..." was the vague answer. I wrote about GDDS here: http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/2008-December/223455.html ...and I wrote a document as a template for standardization of routing information here, but I suspect nobody uses it: http://www.loligo.com/asterisk/misc/rates/ <sigh> The pain goes on. So glad I'm not doing that ops stuff any longer. JT