What is A2Billing

A2Billing combined with Asterisk now gives any Telecom company a very good reason to consider the A2Billing Soft-Switch over the traditional offerings for TDM and VoIP Soft-Switches as well as wholesale and IP PBX billing, particularly when you consider the cost of A2Billing – FREE! If you want to launch any of the following services, then A2Billing may be the system for you:

• Traditional Calling Card services – A2Billing can be configured to provide standard calling card services via traditional “dial through”, with PIN or CID authentication.

• Callback services, A2Billing supports a number of call-back methods including ANI, DID and web based call-backs.

• VoIP residential services – Customers can be issued with a softphone or hard phone and be billed for calls made via Voice over IP.

• VoIP wholesale termination - A2Billing and Asterisk can be used as a softswitch to terminate and bill large numbers of VoIP minutes from a number of sources such as resellers and distributors of your services.

• VoIP termination for Asterisk and FreePBX systems. – With the growth of IP based PBX systems, as well as the asterisk based systems, A2Billing can be used to provide services and billing to IP PBX resellers and Asterisk system integrators.

• DID termination and redirection. DID can be redirected to any SIP, IAX or PSTN destination with monthly charges and duration based charges.

Its is fair to say that A2Billing when combined with Asterisk is is now a full featured telecom platform and softswitch providing converged services, with self contained billing (pre or post-paid), reporting and statistics for IP and TDM based voice networks and can be configured to supply a wide range of services, rate calls, prepare and send out invoices, as well as accept payments via a number of payment service providers.
The A2Billing solution comprises of the following components: -

• Server: The computer to run the system.
• Line Interface Cards: The Digium hardware (optional)to connect to the TDM network (PRI, BRI, Analogue)
• Linux: The base operating system
• Asterisk: The telephony engine
• Apache: The web server
• MySQL/Postgresql: The back end database
• A2Billing: The Billing engine handling Authentication, Authorisation and Accounting.

The platform can be fitted with a TDM cards to interconnect with the PSTN, and can support in excess of 120 concurrent calls given the right hardware. If more capacity is required, then more Asterisk servers can be added as necessary.
The A2Billing Platform has been deployed in a number of commercial environments by both traditional TDM based telecoms companies wishing to move into the VoIP market, and calling card and call-shop businesses. Additionally, there has been a lot of interest from IT and networking companies who are beginning to deploy VoIP PBXs in addition to their traditional business, and wish to enjoy an ongoing income by terminating their customer’s calls using A2Billing as their Wholesale Billing Platform.
A2Billing is licenced under the AGPL – this means that you have the freedom to modify the system to suit your own needs, within the rules of the AGPL.

official website for a2billing is www.a2billing.org.