[VoiceOps] Billing of Forwarded Calls

[Scott Berkman]

Think about this in the context of a SIP trunking provider where the systems in question are customer systems that you cannot control, pull CDR off of, or require diversion headers from.  You can't tell the customer you won't provide them SIP trunks because "their system sucks".  Because you are trying to support a wide range of systems, the presence or absence of a diversion header will be a variable.

	-Scott

-----Original Message-----
From: anorexicpoodle [mailto:anorexicpoodle at gmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, November 11, 2009 3:12 PM
To: Alex Balashov
Cc: Scott Berkman; voiceops at voiceops.org
Subject: Re: [VoiceOps] Billing of Forwarded Calls

Look for the presence of a diversion header, if the diversion header is
there, then that is the responsible party. I cannot speak to the
particulars of your platform, but as long as you make sure that if a
diversion header is present it is assigned as the responsible party your
billing should come out correct in this flow. If your switch/endpoint is
not adding a diversion header then I am inclined to agree with Alex.

On Wed, 2009-11-11 at 13:01 -0500, Alex Balashov wrote:
> Scott Berkman wrote:
> 
> > So how do most of you deal with billing of forwarded calls (specifically 
> > where the calling number on the forwarded leg is using the original 
> > calling number from the inbound leg) in a SIP environment when the 
> > originally called number is not preserved in the new invite?  In this 
> > case there is no way to match the calling or called number to a specific 
> > customer.
> > 
> > Do you bill by IP address or interface instead?  Do you somehow use a 
> > system that correlates the forwarded leg to the original inbound leg?  
> > I’ve come across this issue a few different times when trying to bill 
> > off of SIP messaging logs, for instance radius off a SIP SBC or SQL logs 
> > from SER.
> 
> In my view, that depends on what is doing the forwarding.
> 
> If it's the customer handset actually initiating the forward, then it 
> should just look like a normal termination call from the customer.
> 
> If it's a multi-tenant switch or other call control agent, it should 
> have some way of associating forwarded calls with an account and 
> sticking an account ID or similar into the CDRs, which will reveal who 
> to bill and presumably the rate plan to use.
> 
> If it can't do that, the product sucks.
> 
> -- Alex
>