[VoiceOps] Creating an International Rate Deck

[Ryan Delgrosso]

This is (un) fortunately a problem I'm intimately familiar with. In the 
end Ive pretty much always solved it by writing a small utility or script.

1: You need to normalize breakouts across carriers, this means expanding 
to the longest match, so in the previous example:

Number dialed: 44-20-7499-9000
Carrier A: 44 - 0.0025
Carrier B: 442 - 0.0045
Carrier C: 44207 - 0.0085

you end up with:
44: carrier A - 0.0025
442: carrier A - 0.0025, Carrier B - 0.0045
44207: carrier A - 0.0025, Carrier B - 0.0045, Carrier C - 0.0085

Great now your routing table is instead of 215k entries, 1.3M but its 
comparable.

If you have a cost cap, before you do the next part, strip all routes 
that exceed it. You don't want pricing for routes you'll never use 
influencing your rates.

2: For each destination drop your lowest cost and use some combination 
of your tolerable route depth pricing * some margin. You might also 
consider a smarter algo like dropping lowest if more than std dev away 
from avg of next X carriers etc. Basically you dont want your price 
forced below carrier 2/3 by an abnormally low 1 who in the end will 
never complete calls satisfactorily for you.

3: Now, you need to de-duplicate, removing all routes whose price is 
identical to their parent route (route stripping the right-most digit, 
if that doesnt exist, strip again until you hit base country code)

4: Finally, take your rate deck to your sales team and listen to them 
tell you how they cannot sell it because its more expensive than 
<fly_ny_night_telecom>.

There are lots of other ways to do this, but i pretty much always 
implement some flavor of this process.

FYI, after expansion, if you have the means, its always worth adding a 
step that scans for fictitious codes. Occasionally IRSF perpetrators 
will inject bogus country sub-codes in the hopes of getting FAS traffic 
from fraudsters.

Hope that helps.

-Ryan

On 6/4/2019 7:10 AM, Shripal Daphtary wrote:
> Hey group,
>
> I have a question that I have been struggling with for years and have 
> never come up with a good solution for.  It revolves around 
> International Rate Deck creation, but i guess it could be for any 
> tariff.   We have multiple carriers for International, however, i'm 
> trying out Thinq right now so we can use their LCR.  Our other 
> carriers aren't very successful with Intl.  Thinq's rate deck to me is 
> 6 carriers for each prefix, making it around 215,000 lines. The 
> carrier(s) that have the lowest cost for each prefix varies, so i 
> can't turn off the most expensive three or something like that.
>
> I was thinking of taking the least expensive 3 carriers and then 
> averaging them and creating my rate from that average and then only 
> allow Thinq to go 3 carriers deep. Does anyone have any experience 
> with this?   Are there any best practices?
>
> The second part of the question is how does one calculate the profit 
> margin?  Let's say you wanted to make 35% for retail and 20% for 
> wholesale, but if you call UK landline, the cost is only 0.004.  Your 
> rate  would be 0.0054 for retail and 0.0048, which is nothing.  We 
> have been doing something like If your cost is less than 0.03, then 
> increase by 35% or 20% or whatever.  however, that doesn't always work 
> if the cost is super close to your target.
>
> Does anyone have any hard and fast rules that they use when creating 
> decks? is there software that can help my puny brain think through this?
>
>
> Thanks !
>
> Shri
>
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