11 July 2012

Least Cost Routing (LCR) with A2Billing


Introduction:
One way A2Billing supports least cost routing using multiple providers is when each provider’s data have the exact same length prefixes for each area. But most (probable 95%) of the time this is not the case so just importing providers rates and expecting a2billing to find the least cost route will give one a very sad disappointment. Many providers will have many of the same prefixes but almost all will have many that are different length for same areas.
Example:
  • Provider A gives USA rates by area code and prefix 812 which is three digits. (Rate = 0.015)
  • Provider B gives USA rates by area code and prefix 812739 which is six digits. (Rate = 0.01)
  • Provider C gives USA rates by area code and prefix 8127392 which is 7 digits. (Rate = 0.03)
When a call is made to 812-739-2340 the call will go out Provider C even though its double the rate of Provider A and three times the rate of Provider B. This is because A2Billing looks for the longest prefix.
The best way at the moment to use the A2Billing least cost routing is by converting all the prefixes for all the providers to match the longest used prefix for any giving area.
Solution:
Here is a free program to help converting prefixes from different providers to the same format. I can send sources on demand (Created with Delhi 7).
http://www.data4ict.com/download/lcr.zip

User manual:

  1. Create a csv file with longest prefixesFormat: Prefix,Destination
  2. Create a csv file with the rates of your provider (One csv file by provider)Format: Prefix,Destination,Price
  3. Generate the LCR output table
  4. Export the generated file (csv format)


Demo:
Here are four files (Prefixes, Provider1, Provider2, Provider3) to test the program.
http://www.data4ict.com/download/lcr_demo.zip


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