Re: [Kamailio-Users] prepaid system

It's a good thought. My concern is that from an economic perspective, coming up with any grand, unifying schemes or projects to solve these architectural challenges is mostly a pointless waste of time. While admittedly the prepaid model is proving to be quite a viable inroad in many parts of the world outside of the US and W. Europe (and indeed, much of the interest seems to be there), fundamentally it can only exist to the measure that: (1) Voice switching, transport and subscriber services are billed by per-minute usage, and voice infrastructure and service delivery systems are monetised this way; (2) The process of rebilling for usage is a derivative function of the economics of PSTN interconnection and how the PSTN TDM carrier-world business model works (a series of billable events and relatively fixed reservations of capacity) versus the Internet business model (primarily flat-rate peering and settlement-free peering among backbone haulers) that revolves around higher-order applications delivered over packets; (3) There are not too many flat-rate alternatives available elsewhere in the telecom world. I think #3 is the most important and the one that is likely to prove most relevant in the short term, as I think we can all agree that there is no expectation that the PSTN in a time frame anyone would deem short to immediate term. For example, here in the US, pre-paid calling cards are largely obsolete and highly irrelevant from a mass-market perspective. They survive in various niches where people remain that are somehow sentimentally or inertially attached to calling cards and fixed-line long-distance; this includes retirees, large communities of first-generation immigrants for whom this is a viable means of making calls to their home countries relatively inexpensively, and so on. But really, by and large landline revenue is falling precipitously, everyone has a mobile, international rate plans are available for those who truly need to make a lot of international calls, and domestic long-distance is increasingly flat-rate / unlimited on fixed-line (and is already so on mobile). For the most part, people ordering origination (DIDs) in the form of wholesale trunking are interested in flat-rate DIDs as well. Termination will remain usage-based, but only so far as points #1 and #2 above are highly operative, and only so long as private VoIP peering doesn't gain any serious traction. All these details can be debated at great length, but the salient point here is that this is a business model that is intimately bound up with the idiosyncrasies of the PSTN and the way the incumbent voice business has functioned for almost a century. It is fairly obvious, I think, that whenever it is that we do get around to moving beyond the PSTN, in part or in whole, the centrality and unassailable importance of "minutes" as a billing fixture will be expected to disappear in line with the ontology to which all other Internet-based application services are subject. Meanwhile, the incumbent telco world will go increasingly to flat-rate and unlimited plans and there will be continuing downward cost pressure, as well as increasing local loop deregulation and unbundling in a variety of other national markets in which state incumbents persist with varying degrees of success. So, while this sort of stuff can probably make a decent amount of money in the US and Europe if appropriatedly positioned/marketed/specialised, and certainly can work in Latin America, the Middle East, etc., it does have the quality of being somewhat regressive and not particularly forward-thinking. It is overly connected to a shifting and unstable landscape of arbitrage opportunities arising from the position of VoIP relative to the PSTN and wireless; specifically, that most calls still terminate or transit the PSTN. That's why I think a large, consolidated open-source effort to build a highly complicated, robust prepaid service delivery platform from components like Kamailio/OpenSIPS is largely pointless. Otherwise I would be the first to lend it my enthusiasm. Luciano Afranllie wrote: -- Alex Balashov Evariste Systems Web : http://www.evaristesys.com/ Tel : (+1) (678) 954-0670 Direct : (+1) (678) 954-0671 Mobile : (+1) (678) 237-1775 _______________________________________________ Users mailing list Users(a)lists.kamailio.org http://lists.kamailio.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/users