Archive for the ‘VoIP’ Category

PostHeaderIcon Money Saving Tips of the VoIP Business Owner

Linda Evans asked:




Especially in the global economic crisis, where everybody is penny-pinching, customers and businesses are eager to find ways to save money. If you can’t or don’t want to adapt,  you can become extinct. So you must change to be successful, and VoIP offers you that possibility. It has become an excellent alternative for telecom providers in regards of saving money. The biggest advantages of VoIP is the low cost, that`s why VoIP is one of the fastest growing business sectors today. The opportunities of VoIP technology are almost unlimited.

As for VoIP business itself, the core of it is billing and management software, that should take care of everything from simple billing of calls to customers relationships, analysis, traffic monitoring, reporting and even routing. It might be thought that routing is part of VoIP switch, however nowadays it has become clear that it should be controlled by billing, because only this VoIP network component possesses newest information on rates and relations between customers, vendors, resellers, their balances, etc. But, since dynamic routing is not the only feature that allows to save money, lets look at all of them.

Ways to Use Dynamic Routing to Save Money



Each business exists to earn a profit. You can increase your revenues or cut down your costs, that is definitely easier to do.

First of all, to run your business successfully spend your money on solutions that you need most and never spend one cent on unnecessary things.

The most notorious thing about dynamic routing is so-called Least Cost Routing or LCR. The key task LCR software must do is routing of traffic through the most cheap routes. However LCR is just one of the possible dynamic routing policies or algorithms, others can be based on quality or include both LCR and quality, and good software should allow you to create your own special routing algorithms for special cases.

With dynamic routing it is not necessary for you to configure the switch system for routing. You do not need an engineer for technical assistant position as these labour intensive tasks will be handled by dynamic routing engine, thus allowing you to save payroll costs.

When you choose billing software for dynamic routing you need to be attentive – a lot of vendors declare LCR support, but it might mean that they can do just least cost routing and nothing more, but today, with complex relationships between customers and vendors, it may not be enough for successful business operation.

Profit Margins Control



The other important part of dynamic routing is profit margins control. It allows you to set what profit you want to earn on each customer, destination or route. You can, for example, state that you want to earn at least 1 cent on the customer, or 2% of call rate.

So you wouldn’t lose any cent.

However, same as with dynamic routing, when you choose VoIP Billing and management software that will complete this task, pay your attention to the flexibility of available tools. Some billing developers may state that they have profit margin, but in reality you can set only global profit margin for all routes, which is often unacceptable.

Channels Quality Control



Other very important function of billing and management systems is automated channel quality control. Ealier you had to have the routing engineer to check the channels and monitore quality of the routes, and if some of them go down – he blocks it on the router. But times have changed. Now, it’s much more convenient to control quality automatically and modern billing system offer this possibility. They ae able to check quality per specified periods of time and block the routes if they go down. More advanced systems even allow to detect and block so-called FAS (False Answering). Usage of this feature will further help you to reduce expences, and significantly improve quality control.

More Money Saving Ideas



Study a market. Get to know your product. Make sure you are getting top quality, reliability, usability; Request for trial version. Make sure that you are getting the best solution for your needs; Check compatibility of billing system with popular gateways, gatekeepers, proxies and soft switches; Responsiveness. Ensure your supplier of solution can react to any changes quickly. Ask for technical support; Upgradability. Your requirements can change, so make sure your product is easily upgradable; Get to know how purchased solution will help make your employees more effective; Check if VoIP software vendor supports all money-saving features described above.

How to choose VoIP Billing Software



VoiP business is very dynamic and is growing from day-to-day. You need to pay attention to take your place in VoIP business. If you decide to purchase billing with limited features, in near future you will need to replace it with more advanced solution to keep up the pace. Always ask developer about the trial version that should be provided for free for a period enough to test all of solution’s functions in live environment.

Leading VoIP Billing Software Solutions for Service Providers



Billberry is a great solution created by Jerasoft Development that offers Dynamical Routing features. It’s perfect web-based IP telephony billing software for retail and wholesale VoIP operators as customers of Mera softswitches and other VoIP solutions: Asterisk-based phone systems, NexTone VoIP platforms, Cisco VoIP systems and Quintum VoIP gateways.  BillBery is a sophisticated billing platform product with exceprional functionality, and with price range starting as low as 4000 EUR is one of the most popular VoIP Billing platforms for Mera MVTS family and other softswith solutions. It’s easy to request a free trial of Billbery from the developer, to evaluate the software under real time conditions. The solution supports dynamic authorization and routing, which gives a unique opportunity to release absolutely any billing scenarios, which provide the support of prepaid/postpaid business model. Application also supports telephone cards, callshops, blocks unprofitable calls, routing of traffic through the most high-qualified or cheap routing, recognition and blocking of fraudulent sluice, calls monitoring in real time setting etc.

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