Re: [Serusers] Session-Timers for Prepaid

I think the main reason prepaid exists in voip, is that there is very little control on who ur customer is, or where they are, hence collecting money from someone who has bought an account online is very hard. Obviously if you dont sell online and sell to ur broadband customers etc, prepaid is not an issue u just bill them after the fact. However the problem for a supplier is that upstream gateways all want prepaid,and unless this changes it is very hard for a provider to offer postpaid since cashflow just does not add up. Also the voip business is really full of dodgy characters who run off with the money, hence postpaid again is hard...but as Jan said it is the way to go. Corporates will not prepay, they would prefer postpaid, even residential like to be billed afterwards, hence what needs to happen is that u need to limit the sales to a local community which can be controlled as opposed for going for worldwide domaination. Ser and prepaid, I think its hard to have a tigh 100% solution for prepaid, just because SER is not designed as a B2BUA, which asterisk has included, but if u look at the additional cost incurred to scale upto 10000 users, in terms of bandwidth and hardware, and apportion some of that cost to lost billing minutes, u'll find ser a much better option. After all most of the features asterisk has are not going to be used by the majority of your customers, unless of course u target the corporate PBX market. For prepay and SER what u need is to know the time, and then send disconnect.The time u can do a basic systems from acc, unmatched INVITES, session-timers etc etc, the disconnect use sipsak..however the latter I just cannot get to work well. I think ser could use a tighter module which would disconnect. Iqbal On 7/8/2005, "Bruno Lopes F. Cabral" <bruno(a)openline.com.br> wrote: