provided by Star2Billing S.L.

A2Billing team. I currently am using wireless mesh with Asterisk and FreePBX thanks to Joe Roper! The wireless mesh system is currently is Locustworld however I experimenting with OLSR. Nevertheless I was looking for A2Billing system to no only give access and control of Asterisk VoIP but also to authenticate user from using wireless mesh. Is it possible to integrate a "freeRadius" services with your next A2Billing road map?

I would need to authenticate on the devices MAC address rather than a userid and password. The device would need to let the user know if he is default of his account or if he is not then splash page could tell him or her about their account status. Now Joe may be able to give you more guidance. This is not a hot spot but more like cellular telephone. The cellular telephone authenticates on it network address. I just thought it would be good to do the same thing.

If it done on a freeRadius services or any type of authentication service then this would be very cool.

That would surely be an intriguing feature.

Some thoughts:
Do you only want device authentication? or even billing in conjunction with Radius's services?

Asterisk and a2b work in the upper layers, ie. they receive the SIP headers, authenticate in the 7th layer and let the calls through, even if the phone is behind NAT or so. Your suggestion about the MAC has to do with lower levels, which asterisk doesn't care about. Say, to prove that a MAC is right, asterisk would have to search the ARP cache of the system.. What happens if the asterisk is not on the same ethernet segment as the phone?

Surely, one quick answer would be to have Radius authenticate, provide an IP and then tell asterisk (through the Realtime engine) to trust the IP of that device (doable).

One further question is, would the phone be correctly configured to use our service?

Again, there is a quick answer: we have started implementing device provisioning templates in a2b. If you use those, a phone will receive its unique configuration, based on its MAC. Then, it will correctly find the asterisk server and other parameters.

Remember if you are using a wi-fi telephone the way to authenticate would be on MAC Address, and or through a web browser. What you suggest is using freeRadius to give a trusted IP address out. I believe that level of complexity would also work however using Locustworld or other free wireless mesh automatically gives out an IP address based on the node that is being used. It uses a splash page concept to hijack request to either authenticate using userid and password or can utilize the MAC address on the device. I would like to it work similar to a cell phone which is authorized at the MAC level.

Hi Don

Good to see you on these forums, I hope that you are doing well with A2Billing etc.

The design plan I had mapped out for authentication of Mesh users and others, coupled with Radius servers was as follows:-

FreeRadius and optionally Chilispot would be installed on the A2Billing server, or at least attached to the billing server.

FreeRadius and Chillispot would use a view of the CC_Card table for authentication.

In this way, you could use A2Billing as the billing server for double play products (Phone and Internet), while giving the customer an web portal to view and top up the account vi Paypal, while the subscriptions facility would be used for the monthly payment.

Where Chillispot was being used, either on the basis of cents per Meg, or Cents for time, then these could be regarded as the same as phone calls, and in some way added to the CDR, and the balance deducted from the customer's account.


Joe

Hi Joe

Yeap that is it can we now have this integrated as part of A2Billing next release? I beleave have an integrated solution like this would be the ticket ( sorry for the pun.)

But you bring up a pretty good solution for double play! I don't want to muddy the water but if you can think in terms of triple or quadruple play I believe a2billing solution would be right up there. Triple play has led to the term "quadruple play" where wireless communications is introduced as another medium to deliver video, Internet access, and voice telephone service.

I know that telephony is king but the a2billing is showing that it can competite with bigger and larger solutions. I just think if we also added Joomla on the back end that we would have a complete solution!

And in terms of service this is what small telephony want. If they don't need IPTV or wireless than they don't have to turn it on. However, I would like to be able to provide both telephony and wireless in the same solution and I believe Joe that the solution that you provided would work.

The question is "do you integrated with a2billing or do you combine it as a suite of products under a2billing?

Added after 2 hours 6 minutes:

I just check out chillispot and the project and website have gone away. A new fork in chillispot is CoovaChilli maybe we should look at that?

Clearly a quadruple play solution is required and what ever technology we have for that solution would be appreciated.

I think a2billing is looked as core system with a suite of integrated products. I like the idea of adding or removing product of software that is require or not.

Oops I went on tangent didn't I

Don

Its been about a year since I've opened this discussion and now an convienced that A2B would be the right product for Quadruaple play. If I want to give a person access to media I would use the same choices that A2B is offering today such as prepaid, subscription, vouchers, etc. I believe with this convergence of billings, radius, and various level of authentication we should be able to add plugs into A2B to support wireless, IPTV, internet, VoIP please see article http://moskaluk.com/how_to_build_your_o ... ruple_.htm

I'm not trying to change the direction of A2B but open it for other similar activities.

I wish you luck, and I look forward to seeing your patches to accomplish this behaviour.