Video and Slides
Outline: Introduction of ASTPP – A Smart TelePhony Platform
Samir Doshi, Open Source VoIP Expert, ASTPP Community Leader, Cofounder of iNextrix Technologies Pvt. LtdCo-Founder and Director, iNextrix Technologies
- What is ASTPP?
- What makes ASTPP a Smart TelePhony Platform?
- What is the Role of FreeSWITCH and OpenSIPs in Making ASTPP Highly Robust and Scalable?
- Why people love open source version of ASTPP smart VoIP telephony platform?
- Which are the common challenges each business faces?
- What is the Role of ASTPP in resolving challenges faced by businesses?
- What are the key features of ASTPP?
- How to deploy open source VoIP solution version of ASTPP?
- What are the major use cases of this smart VoIP telephony platform?
For more than 16 years, ASTPP caters to global VoIP businesses as an open source VoIP billing solution. Now it offers several other VoIP solutions, which hold smart features and functionalities. Some of the most popular VoIP solutions available as add-ons of ASTPP are:
- Multi tenant IP PBX solution
- Fax server solution
- Technical support ticket software
- Fraud detection solution
- DID and calling card management systems
To know more about ASTPP, you can visit https://www.astppbilling.org/.
Presentation Review
You can ask Samir questions in the comments section of this weblog, or contact him directly, his info is in the presentation. Samir was unable to record his presentation at the start of the month due to contracting COVID, we’re happy he’s now well and able to give an excellent presentation.
Billing is one of those functions that catches many service providers by surprise. “We have a real-time usage dashboard, we can convert that into real-time billing easily.” Or, “we’ll do a monthly invoice based on the spreadsheet we can create for each customer’s usage.”
Soon new services, use cases, credits and discounts, product codes, and reporting appear requiring updates to the now legacy billing platform. The company starts to feel like it’s turned into a billing platform maintainer; where the biggest gate on the product roadmap is billing.
It’s surprising we’ve not seen more open source billing projects like ASTPP. Samir sets out some of the business challenges faced by many service providers:
- Non-availability of billing solution
- Ineffective business expansion
- Non-accurate client profiling
- Ineffective reseller management (wholesale and retail rates)
- Maintaining invoicing
- Complicated interface
- Difficulty in scalability
- Non-consolidated solution
- Non-mobilized platform
- Challenging 3rd party platform integration
Samir reviews how ASTPP addresses these business challenges, as well as how features can be added on, thanks to ASTPP’s modular design. For example, fax billing. Fax remains popular, and is challenging to bill satisfactorily. Hence a dedicated add-on.
Other add-ons include separating international call credits to limit exposure to potentially costly fraud, also fraud detection, alarms, personalized calling rates, account number ranges (handy for resellers), scheduled reporting, and integrations into 3rd party applications like mailchimp.
Samir runs through some of the deployments of ASTPP. Its a nice evolution of how a service provider may start with SIP trunking, then add multi-tenant IP PBX, and then interconnect as the business scales.
The scale of ASTPP surprised me, it supports 13 languages, and has 11k+ deployments across 95 countries. Please check out ASTPP.
Thx Samir for a great introduction to ASTPP. I have a few questions:
1) What is the most common business challenge ASTPP solves?
2) Why are there so few open source billing projects? Billing is expensive, and many home grown projects end up migrating onto an expensive closed-source platform.
3) What are some of the hardest problems you’ve solved with ASTPP?
4) What is included in the fraud detection Add-on?
5) What Add-ons are your planning to develop?
1) What is the most common business challenge ASTPP solves?
Answer:
ASTPP is a smart VoIP telephony solution and thus, it can resolve several business challenges. If I talk about some major ones then:
It can provide rich communication features for businesses, which is not possible with traditional telecommunication systems.
It can reduce expenses on business communication.
It can provide a complete solution to run a business as a VoIP provider or an ITSP.
It can resolve complications related to billing in the VoIP industry.
2) Why are there so few open source billing projects? Billing is expensive, and many home grown projects end up migrating onto an expensive closed-source platform.
Answer:
There can be different reasons, but two major factors contributing to the existence of fewer open source billing solutions are. 1. Billing is a very crucial aspect in a VoIP business to successfully run a business. Thus, people get settled with one billing solution and then do not change until the billing requirements change from scratch.
2. Lack of community members is another factor for having fewer open source billing systems in the market even if billing is so important. The open source community and its activeness are necessary for keeping and maintaining any VoIP software. People are more enthusiastic and passionate about open source PBX software compared to billing. This contributes to fewer open source billing projects.
3) What are some of the hardest problems you’ve solved with ASTPP?
Answer:
ASTPP has solved several major roadblocks for different VoIP businesses. Some of the most crucial ones are:
1. Scalability: ASTPP has a powerful and flexible architecture, which is highly scalable, unlike many other VoIP solutions that do not have the required scalable nature. Additionally, the ASTPP team deploys the cluster for the business to make sure they get a highly scalable and reliable solution.
2. Simplified management: ASTPP is a one stop solution for a business that wants to offer different services. Instead of buying and managing multiple VoIP solutions, using the ASTPP enterprise solution would be enough. It provides access to all major VoIP solutions needed to run a successful VoIP business. This simplified the management of VoIP solutions as a single platform needs to be managed.
4) What is included in the fraud detection Add-on?
Answer:
It safeguards your business from any type of malicious, hack, fraudulence and / or unintentional attacks / misuses. This module detects all misuses and attacks on the user interface / account and ongoing calls. On detection of unusual activities which can be a potential attack / misuse of the system, the ASTPP system will alert admin and reseller in real time with email / SMS notification. Moreover, the system will take appropriate actions to protect the system from any further damage or loss. You can find more information from, https://www.astppbilling.org/addons/fraud-detection/
5) What Add-ons are you planning to develop?
Answer:
ASTPP is a dynamic solution and we keep on developing new features and add-ons for its users. We have recently launched the beta of ASTPP version 5.0, which has interesting add-ons like two factor authentication, stripe payment gateway, and number portability. It also has some interesting features.
In the future, we are striving to add more features to the multi tenant IP PBX solution and fax server add-ons. We also have a roadmap that focuses on adding SMS, broadcast, multiple payment gateways, and some advanced functionalities in the form of the add-on in the future versions of ASTPP.