provided by Star2Billing S.L.

Hello all,

we provide voip service to our end customers in the following way: we register both a trunk (with our upstream telephony provider) and an extension (with our end customer) on a single asterisk server with the same DID number.
We have a2billing installed on the same asterisk server. In order to ease the billing procedure, we'd like to apply rates to groups of trunks that fall in the same general service type. For instance, residential customers, or businesses, and so on.
By using a2billing, though, I haven't found a way to apply a ratecard to a group of trunks, beacuse each ratecard requires me to specify a single trunk - in other words, I'd like to know if there's a way to "group" together trunks from the rate assignment point of view, yet let each customer dial out using his own assigned trunk on the PBX side.

Not sure if that's entirely clear, I am still very new to a2billing and trying to grasp as much as I can from the documentation and other posts, so please bear with me: I may have missed something extremely obvious for you guys, and if that's the case I apologize in advance.

Thanks.
nitefood

I'm not sure I follow what you are trying to do.

You can have rates for many separate trunks in a2billing, but A2Billing will send the call to the least expensive (LCR) based on the rates in the call plan the customer uses.

You can have a failover trunk so if the call fails to go out via a specific trunk it will try a second trunk. You should be aware that the rate is not recalculated though if this happens.

Having separate outbound trunk for each a2billing customer seems like an unmanageable overhead. Normally you would have a single outbound trunk (or maybe multiple for different routes).

You've understood what I mean, and your reply is what I was afraid of. There is no such atomic item as a "group of trunks" in a2billing, but that's the way our current upstream voip provider forces us to interconnect: one trunk per phone number.

I realize it would extremely more efficient to set up a single trunk containing many DIDs, which we do when we request a number portability for such trunks, and letting customers dial out with their assigned CID using a single outgoing route.

Short of redefining this policy with our upstream, I assume at this point there is no way to obtain a manageable situation with our current practices.

Thanks for the reply and for any suggestions.
Best regards