MTE and Billing Systems

the last customer i had who used freeside has spent $3k sofar cleaning up the mess freeside created. it even deleted thirdlane tenant and all the thirdlane features to record ivr messages etc

Thats very helpful, but what do you suggest that I use then?
Thanks;
FSD

I use a platform called DTH billing. I would *Highly* recommend sending your calls through an external asterisk gateway and use that CDR to bill off of if billing for inbound calls is important to you (such as billing per min on toll-free numbers). The pricing structure is tiered based on concurrent volume. Eventually it gets expensive but by then your monthly recurring is more than 3x the initial annual cost at that tier and you never just pay that price, you pay the delta between the two tiers and the renewal is 20% of the listed price. Its actually a little confusing when I try to explain it so perhaps you should talk to Dean yourself :-) .. tell him I sent you, it will pay back some karma for all the nagging I have been giving him lately in order to solve some special needs.

Just to clear the air here. Freeside will not spontaneously delete your PBX's. If you un-provision the pbx from Freeside, it will remove the PBX on the server(you don't want canceled customers to still have access right?). Freeside will also provision PBX's, PBX admins, DID's, and bill CDR records based on the tenant instead of src/dst numbers. I am sorry your customer had a bad experience using Freeside, but we have several customers using Freeside to bill and provision to/from the ThirdLane MT system without issues. If your customer is still having issues we have many sources of free support (mailing list, web forums) as well as paid support options.

In the interest of 'clearing the air' .. this is a mutual customer. You spoke of free support, this customer paid freeside to do the entire installation for them. This goes well beyond just free support. I was called in to clean up the mess. The installation of asterisk had to be one of the worst, untested, unprofessional installations I have seen in some time. If you had run even a basic test call it would have been immediately apparent that you forgot to install ALL sound files.. who installs asterisk and forgets to install every single sound file that comes with asterisk? Why was freeside incapable of getting a MySQL database up and running and have an asterisk mysql module running? These are all basic procedures I would expect someone charging for services to be able to perform. An even basic check and test of the system would have flushed this out rather quickly.

To answer your statement about removing a tenant from thirdlane when unprovisioning.. WHY??? Thirdlane fully supports disabling an account instead of removing it. The bottom line is you should never remove the thirdlane tenant as all the other important utilities that thirdlane uses were removed. Additionally the removal process does not appear to remove everything which leaves a lot of house keeping left over anyway. When I got on this box to clean it up, not once but on two separate occasions, Freeside had wiped out the entire outbound.include file. At least if freeside is just de-activating tenants instead of deleting them, there remains the possibility of recovering from a situation this dire without having to re-create the files in 'vim' based on the original sample files.

First off, the customer absolutely did not pay us to "Install the whole thing", configure mysql or asterisk or anything of this. We DO NOT offer thirdlane consultation/support in any way shape or form. We do provide the services to provision directly to Thirdlane and to import the CDR's for billing purposes.

thats not how the customer tells it. When I got into the box I discovered 3 things.. 1) it was not installed via the ISO. 2) there were a lot of missing pieces that should have been installed 3) the RPM files downloaded did not match any version on any of the ISOs. They were versions from the update repository that were newer than the old ISO but older than the BETA ISO currently in circulation.

when I asked the customer who downloaded and installed those RPM's his reply was 'what's an RPM?'. He has no knowledge what so ever about unix so we can safely discard him as a possible source of the installation. When I asked how this got installed he replied that he put a CentOS cd into the server and gave Freeside the IP address of the lights-out management card and they installed it remotely. If you claim to not offer this feature, then perhaps one of your employees is doing some side work and not making it clear to your customer that said side work is not part of the Freeside contract. There is no way this customer could have installed this on his own, nor could he have found those update-repository versions of RPM files. The customer is thoroughly convinced that Freeside proper is the entity that performed those tasks.

Guys,

I cant provide all the details just yet. However, I will give you the overall picture.

We're a Private Label VoIP provider that offers complete systems to VARs, ISPs, CLECs, PCO's, IT Admins and so on. It includes switching, billing, crm and much more.

Back in March we were in the same scenario looking for a new PBX platform to integrate to and found TL MTE.

The main integration is complete. We're just finalizing some of the realtime survivability and integration with our SBC for NAT, Registrations and Audio Management. This greatly increases the scalability of TL.

The billing integration allows you to create Services that define the price per and max quantity of extensions, special mailbox, special lines, devices, conference rooms, queues and concurrent calls.

It was done this way so you wouldn't have to change your business model to fit the platform but rather make the platform work for your business model. We found that this was what every off the shelf solution was missing.

There will be different versions of the solution. Hosted Billing and Infrastructure, Hosted Billing Your Infrastructure or On premise at your Colo.

We're collocated at the NAP of the Americas with 7 Gig interconnects using the InterNAP flow control platform for optimized jitter, latency and packet loss routing as opposed to just BGP.

Here are just a few of the main billing features (about 25%):
1. Rate plan management based on margins
2. Custom Charges aside from MRC. (Flat rate, Percentage based, One time, or Recurring)
3. Real telecom style taxation via Country, State and City or any combination there of
4. Free Minute bundles to any destination or group of destinations.
5. Realtime billing. Hit F5 and refresh the screen as the customer talks and watch their balance grow.
6. Credit limits to make sure your EU doesn't rack up a bill and bounce limiting your liability.
7. Vonage style Signup wizard with live DID and e911 integration + eCommerce to sell hardware.
8. Payment integration with Paypal Pro and Std, Auth.net and Chase Payment Tech
9. Auto Invoicing with automated provisioning for suspension and termination
10. Email template for everything you can think of
11. A simple and almost Dummy proof and pretty GUI for management.

These are real features that exist today and over 50 resellers use now in their own brand.

Whats new is the ability to use these features for TL tenants. The billing system will now create the tenant with the applicable permissions and bill their calls in real-time.

We'll be launching the new implementation in house within the next 3-4 weeks. After that we're open to discuss offering the solution in the models mentioned above.

that looks great please email some more info about it at mbt11211 at yahoo.com

thanks

WHY??? Thirdlane fully supports disabling an account instead of removing it.

Erik, from what I understand the API doesn't support the disabling of a tenant but only the creation of a tenant and the numbers of extension for that tenant.

We have requested this information and the API from Alex but have yet to receive anything..

is this incorrect..? if it is please enlighten

Thanks
George

There's an API?

Any info???

Alex and I talked about it several months ago but never received the information, I saw eeman posted above, it would seem he has knowledge of the working of the API but it seems he it not saying any more then the post above about it..

I've been emailing Alex about it for a couple months but he is way to busy to respond so I thought I would try here..

guess will have to wait for Alex to get around to responding.. or not..

George