[AusNOG] ISP pricing in the NBN world

[Jake Anderson]

On 16/04/12 19:48, Dobbins, Roland wrote:
> On Apr 16, 2012, at 4:37 PM, Mark Newton wrote:
>
>> I'm imagining a service that aggregates the billing policies from a large number of carriers and provides subscription access to XML files which my phone can download to automate its path selection algorithm.
> Gotcha - but this doesn't exist yet, and likely won't for a long time, as it requires parties who see no direct incentive to cooperate to work together, as well as external information about transit costs and so forth which unfortunately simply isn't available as metadata.
Inter Telco PSTN billing is the biggest pile of steaming !@#$$% you have 
ever seen.
Rates lists are handed around by email in excel spreadsheets or csv (if 
your lucky) but they match by name to the dialcode list, keep in mind 
that the names generally only kinda match (what's a few spaces vs 
hyphens between friends).

There are retroactive rate changes, dialcode changes and actually 
building a complete international dialcode list is a job in itself.

I have written the software that takes carrier rates lists and generates 
a least cost route table, I think the end result was something over 10K 
dialcodes (from memory, I could be well off) after its "compressed" by 
throwing out 0-9 dialcode matches.
Every time the input data needed to be massaged before the LCR table was 
built because its all edited by hand.