VoIP Software: Complete Traffic Management

A telecommunications operator managed its customers’ voice traffic with an Excel sheet and a few formulas written by hand. It worked, until its customers went from 400 to 2,000, and the traffic came from several providers, each with its own logic. It was still being done by hand.

What the software does

It collects call flows directly from the VoIP exchanges and, based on each customer’s price list, calculates their monthly cost. From there come the reports the company uses to look at its own turnover.

It is written in PHP and Symfony, with Redis, MySQL, RabbitMQ, Angular and Bash.

The price list can be corrected backwards

If a rate was applied wrongly, the price list can be changed months or years later, and the software recalculates all the call prices applied up to that point. The corrected prices go into the reports; invoices already issued are handled by the customer.

It is the thing a spreadsheet does not do: to fix three years of billing you would have to redo three years of formulas.

What it keeps an eye on

Two checks that did not exist before because nobody had the time to do them by hand:

• spam calls, tracked;
• customers who call and are not in the customer records, flagged with a notification so they can be added.

The software also warns when a customer drops below the traffic threshold, and top-ups are made from there.

Where it runs

Inside a private space of the customer’s: this is call data, and the choice about it was made before writing the code.

The volume it handles

The system handles the traffic of about 2,000 customers: over 500,000 calls a month, lasting 90 seconds on average.

The traffic comes from five providers, where before there was one, and each sends its data with its own logic.

Support is still active.