As part of several larger projects, the question of rate importation from termination carriers has come up. If a firm has four different LD partners, as an example, then it is obvious that the firm needs to determine at the origination of a call where that call would be best sent on a cost basis. I'll ignore things like quality of service and other metrics for the moment, and stick only to monetary costs. Least Cost Routing is not terribly difficult, but what I have noticed is the lack of standardization as to how I would populate an LCR system on anything even remotely approaching "automatically". I get Excel spreadsheets via email, text files off the web, badly formatted RTF, faxes, snail mail, everything except for cuneiform - though I expect my first clay tablets in interoffice mail any day now. As an IP-centric person and someone who has been exposed to using data networks as a transport mechanism, it seems odd to me that an RFC-like document describing rate table formats has not come across my searches to this point. So...
==== The question is: Is there a standard for automated importation of rate sheets? ====
Perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree here and perhaps there already is an Internet-based standard for transmitting/relaying telephony rate data to customers. If someone could point me towards it, then that would be great - Google did not seem to have any answers after some searching.(*)
If not, here are some questions to you, the LD providers of the world, as to how you relay information to your customers. Let's see if there is any discussion that makes sense on this topic.
Questions on rate table transmissions:
1) Do you make rate sheets available on-line?
- to anyone?
- to just customers?
- what kind of password method do you use?
- is it scriptable by automated fetch programs?
- via what method? (email? web? ftp? database call? other?)2) What format do you use for the file, if file-based?
3) Do you include all possible routes and costs, or just routes you specifically service?
4) Do you include a "default" rate for routes that you do not specifically list?
5) How do you list "peak/off-peak" rates?
- what timezone do you use as the standard? Is it defined the file?6) How does the table indicate first minute/2nd minute/etc. rate changes?
7) Do you use any kind of wildcarding or regular expressions to denote rate areas?
8) Do you use ISO country codes? City codes?
9) What currency do you use? Is it listed in the file in a fixed location?
10) Do you use the exact same format for each rate table transmission?
11) Do you use a "closed" format such as Excel or an "open" format such as CSV or XML?
12) Other comments and perhaps a sample line or two would be useful for the discussion.
Thanks for your comments! JT
*: TRIP (RFC3219) seems to be a protocol into which cost flags could be built, but there are no specific "cost" fields in the RFC, as those were left to future implementations. There does not seem to be any traction for TRIP at the moment, despite my best efforts over the past few months at finding some programmers to implement it into an open-source telephony package. So, we'll stick with batch-mode questions like I describe above.
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