Cisco Billing Solutions

Hi Aram,

I’m afraid that the answer is far longer than the question. There are a lot of VoIP billing providers in the market place and your selection should start by looking at your short and long term goals.

There are a number of packages on the market that are designed for the small to medium sized operation, for example 4 analogue ports up to 4E1’s. These are typically priced accordingly and you should be able to get yourself a full “all-singing and dancing” system for under $10k.

At the other end there are a number of packages that scale up to thousands of simultaneous calls- again these have a price tag to match. Expect to pay anything from $10k to $100k. For large carriers and PTT’s billing starts around $150k and goes north from there – the sky is the limit.

So, decide how much traffic you will realistically be running on your system and plan ahead accordingly. It may be a false economy to buy something cheap now if you are going to outgrow it in a few months and have to replace it.

If you let me know your projections I’d be happy to give you a list to start with of vendors to talk to.

Hope this helps.
Mat – mhitchcock@blue-lava.co.uk

Hi Mat,

we are looking for a billing system that can handle 120 simultaneous calls. We plan to scale up to 500 simultaneous calls in a few months. The important options for us are:

1. prepaid phone card billing
2. recurrent customer billing
3. dialup modem customers
4. recharging of the customer’s account via a credit card (by the customer itself)
5. web access to customer account (by customer)
6. carrier billing
6.1. prepaid billing for carriers

These are in general the points we are currently interested (or could be interested in the near future).

Thanks for your advises
Emin