provided by Star2Billing S.L.

Hello,

I'm thinking in using A2Billing with FreeSWITCH, I want to know if this will work, the reason I ask this is because FreeSWITCH is my platform of choice and A2B seems to be pretty good for what I want to do.

I know A2Billing was designed with Asterisk in mind, but I heard using it with FS is also possible, FreeSWITCH have two ways of doing CDR, one way is xml_cdr and the other way is cdr-csv which is similar to the way Asterisk does CDR, you can also customize it to be like the one in Asterisk, I think it's actually the same, not sure.

I'm sure I can output and INSERT the CDR of FS onto the A2Billing DB, but will that be enough to have billing working? I'm only interested on the billing and calling cards part, I tried A2Billing with Asterisk for a while and I saw that it uses some kind of AGI/DeadAGI, what is that for? And will it will work without that?

Thanks,

Diego

The architecture is as follows:-

Call comes into Asterisk, passed into a2billing.php which rates the dialled digits, identifies the customer, and sets the total amount of time that the customer can call. After it has done that, it sends a dial command to Asterisk saying dial the number, and keep the cal open for x minutes. At the end of the call, report the number of minutes called back to a2billing.php and update the balance.

So as you can see there is a relatively close relationship between Asterisk and A2Billing which means that it will not work with freeswitch without major modification, or possibly a rewrite, but it is something we are interested in developing.

Joe

Thanks for the information, I also asked on the freeswitch community that I wanted to use A2Billing and I heard some vague comments for writing an AGI emulator on top of the FS interfaces.

I hope that will happen so that we could use A2Billing on FreeSWITCH.

Thanks.

I've been reading on how to do this too.

Asterisk has many limitations that FreeSwitch does not have.

Freeswitch was made for what is asterisking doing for A2billing

if you want to emulate A2billing on top of freeswitch you will loose
all advantages and it more time consuming rather than starting something
from the scratch.



good luck