1   Usage Scenario

• you are a vendor of Voice over IP Telephony services (VoIP)
• your customers call other users who can reside on different telephone networks
• your customers pay you for this service
• in order to route the calls on particular networks you have to use the services of other vendors
• you are a customer of others vendors
• you pays others vendors for this service

So each call has a cost and an income because Asterisell views you (the VoIP service provider) as a reseller of others vendors services.

The income is what your customer pays to you and the cost is what you pays to other vendors in order to route the customer call.

2   Asterisell

Asterisell is a PHP5 web application that reads calls information generated from Asterisk VoIP server.

It is responsible for the rate process of calls. Up to date it can not manage the routing of calls.

It permits to associate for every call a cost and an income. The cost is what the customer pays to the service provider and the cost is what the service provider pays to other vendors in order to route the call.

3   Offered Services

From the customer point of view, Asterisell is a web interface where he can inspect calls with associated costs.

From the vendor point of view, Asterisell is a web interface where he can can manage prices lists for customers and rates for other vendors using different currencies and timezones. Then he can inspect calls with associated incomes from customers and expenses due to other vendors.

From a developer point of view, Asterisell is a PHP application that use the symfony framework. It reads Call Detail Records from a CDR table where Asterisk write info for every call.

The use of an object-oriented design permits to extend the software adding new features.

The use of simple YAML based configuration files permits to select at installation time what features to enable or disable, reducing the need for different and hard to maintain branches.

4   Features

Customer features:

• report of calls with aggregate totals
• many filter-criteria
• different sort-criteria
• export to CSV and MS Excel document
• many VoIP accounts associated with the same customer

Administrator features:

• input fields are secure from intrusion attempts
• each customer could have a cost limit for the last 30 days
• informal currency conversion table for the test of cost limits
• administrator is advised via email if a customer pass its cost limit
• different cultures for each VoIP account or Customer
• prices and messages are displayed in the specified culture
• customers can be grouped into different price list categories
• different rate methods applicable to different time periods, customer categories, destination gateway channels, destination telephone network etc..
• customizable rate methods adding PHP Class respecting a specific interface
• generation of customer invoices
• delivery of emails with invoice details to customers
• support bulk generation of invoices and emails to all customers with associated incomes
• support for multi-currency invoices (not yet tested)
• problems during rate process are reported and signaled via email to the administrator

General features:

• multi-culture and locales support (it_IT, en_US, ecc..)
• multi-currency support (not yet tested)

5   Limits

See Asterisell development section