Telinta upgraded to the latest stable PortaSwitch release. The upgrade process went smoothly with no down time incurred for Telinta’s core switch partition and billing services. This release introduces many new exciting features to Telinta’s Hosted PortaSwitch.
Telinta customers can now associate multiple routing plans with a single product in PortaBilling. A specific tariff can be assigned to each routing plan. This tariff will be used when a customer subscribed to a specific plan places a call. In this case, a customer can choose to pay more for premium routes, or to pay less for discount routes. Although this functionality was previously available to Telinta wholesale clients, the new release extends support to all offered VoIP services.
Previously, call authorization in PortaBilling checked the amount of available funds at the start of each call. This scheme has drawbacks for some wholesale billing models, such as the inability to react to balance changes while a call is in progress, with a possibility of an overdraft when multiple simultaneous calls are allowed. PortaBilling now offers the ability to dynamically re-authorize the user’s activity. While a session (e.g. voice call) is in progress, the system can reserve a small portion of the available funds to cover the next short time interval (e.g., 5 minutes). As the end of this interval approaches, the system reserves funds to cover the next interval, and so on. If no remaining funds are available, the call is disconnected.
A new quick account transfer feature was introduced in the PortaBilling XML API. This allows “moving” an account from one customer to another, replicating the entire service configuration (account ID, password, service features, follow-me, and other related settings) and subscriptions on the new account, and terminating the old one. A copy of all old activities, such as CDRs, payments, etc., remains available.
PortaBilling now supports provisioning of DSL Internet access service with Cisco BRAS and other compatible equipment. Telinta customers can provision DSL services with the amount of available bandwidth per product or individual account, and also perform static IP address allocation for certain accounts.
Telinta customers will now be able to generate multiple aliases under one PortaBilling account, in the same convenient way as when generating multiple accounts under a customer. The new release also extends periodic subscriptions charges, allowing charges to be applied at the start of the subscription period, a feature that can reduce risk of bad debt for Telinta customers.
In addition to the hosted billing system improvements, the new PortaSwitch release also includes PortaSIP softswitch and PortaUM voicemail and IVR application features. PortaSIP now supports BLF (‘Busy Lamp Field’). This highly popular IP Centrex feature displays the line status of other extensions. PortaUM is now integrated with the GotVoice service, enabling conversion of recorded voice mails into text messages that can be read from an email client or mobile phone.
For more information about new PortaSwitch features, contact info@telinta.com.