VoIP Billing & Termination – (Residential)
A2Billing should be considered by any company wishing to offer VoIP to its residential customers.
Customers are typically supplied with a soft-phone installed on their PC, a hard-phone which is a physical phone they can plug into their broadband, an ATA (Analogue Terminal Adapter) which gives an analogue phone VoIP capabilities, or with addition of good quality mobile broadband, VoIP clients installed on Smart GSM phones.
There are challenges in providing residential VoIP telephone services, the main one being that you have no control of the customer’s network. This can cause problems with NAT traversal of VoIP communications resulting in one way audio.
Whether or not this is a problem depends on the endpoint and the configuration of the customers network. In order to alleviate these problems, Star2Billing can supply either a Session Border Controller or a SIP proxy server which is integrated seamlessly into A2Billing.
How it Works
The customer will be given, purchase or download a suitable endpoint or phone, which is then configured to point at A2Billing, with the user name and password provided by A2Billing. The customer will be able to pick up the phone and make a phone call, just like using any other phone, except the costs should be cheaper.
DID (Telephone numbers) can be pointed at the customer’s phone so that people can phone your customer from the PSTN. There is no reason why a customer should not have multiple phone numbers, each one in a different country. Additionally, these numbers can be configured to point to a customer’s cell phone or land line, and the customer charged for the call. Calls between A2Billing customers can either be free of charge, or a simple charge can be made, however the DID are routed internally, and therefore no carrier charges are incurred.
Star2Billing has a commercial voice-mail module that can scale across multiple servers which allows the customer to receive voice-mail via their phone, email as an attachment, or via the customer’s portal.
Features and Benefits
- Flexible charging options – The rate table allows for many charging options, including connection and disconnection charges and stepped billing.
- Flexible recurring maintenance charge system.
- Package minutes, with free calls or minutes to selected destinations.
- On Net calls free to the operator.
- On Net calls can be free of charge to the customer, or a per minute fee and/or connection charge can be made.
- Least cost routing via the cheapest carrier.
- Online customer Portal.
- Online Sign-up as standard.
- Subscription charges
- DIDs, with online purchase, monthly billing, and PSTN failover.
- Email low balance notifications.
- Local Dialing options.
- Caller ID manipulation.
- Customer grouping for easier management and control
- Compatible with commission agents.
- Detailed reporting and statistics.
Conclusion
A2Billing is a very attractive VoIP switch, and with its vast array of configuration options can be used to create imaginative and profitable products, is ideally suited for existing telecoms companies wishing to enter the VoIP market, as well as new start-ups who wish to deploy a VoIP platform quickly and at low cost.
We would recommend The Enterprise & Residential System to anyone considering doing large scale residential VoIP. For smaller deployments, consider a Standalone Switch, and add in a Session Border Controller for NAT traversal.
For more information of on the Star2Billing products that can supply call-through services, please click on the links below:-
- Managed Install (Single Server) – Installation of the single server complete with comprehensive training and support.
- Single Server – Suitable for Approximately 200 concurrent calls depending on the hardware and call Patterns.
- Enterprise System with Load Balancing – Scalable to almost any size and capacity, and will load balance across multiple switches.
- Enterprise Voicemail – Add voicemail facilities for residential deployments.
- Session Border Controller - Usually an add-on to to an existing Single Server to assist with NAT traversal inherent in SIP via NAT deployments.