Hi Guys, I'm wondering if the list can help me out a bit, just looking for some ideas really. I have been messing about with this voip stuff for years, but got given an actual network to manage last year, and trying to figure out the best way to clean it up. I really need some community input on Best-Practice for a few design/architectural ideas - Probably stuff you take for granted, but for small fry like me it's difficult to get my head around having not really done this stuff before :) Currently I run a small voip network comprised of some SER boxes with custom modules for accounting and authentication, a couple of AS5300 gateways, and a SIP interconnect with our primary upstream. I'm trying to envision what would be needed to add a little more functionality to this network, and potentially simplify provisioning, accounting and debugging. We have no SBC in the network currently, and just pass SIP packets around, with media flowing either directly to/from the 5300s or to the upstream's SBC. This presents us with problems if we want to add another upstream, we need to get the customers to update their ACLs, and if we want to translate numbers or mess with SIP packets, SER is not really very good at that. I've been talking with ACME about some 3800s as an SBC, but I'm not really sure whether they could take over the full functionality of the current network, and whether I'd need to get some custom management interfaces written to manage route tables etc on the ACME, or if the inbuilt interfaces are good-enough. I guess my question comes in really the form of experience with similar situations - I know a lot of you out there have ACME SBCs in place, do you use it to authenticate sessions directly with the customers, or do you generally have some kind of soft switch sitting in front handling all of that? If so, what kind of soft switches are you running for small volumes of calls - I don't want to be paying $100k for something that OpenSIPS is probably capable of with a little custom development (or can it do everything off-the-shelf these days?) Also wondering CDR wise, at what point in your network do you pull your CDRs and generate bills from- the ACME will create radius start/stop records, but can it attach billing information to those radius records or am I going to have to bolt something on the end of that as well? Wondering rate-table wise if it is best to have a central table somewhere which gets used for generating billing info, and if you have some kind of interface your customers can check current rates? I guess just looking for people who have done this before, what have you found that works and what doesn't, so I can avoid it and save myself some time going down a dead-end road :) Thanks for any assistance, and offlist replies are of course welcome. Sorry for the slightly all-over-the place questions too. Regards, Blair Harrison