Re: Least cost routing

On 19.10.2003, at 17:30, Alex Kinch wrote:

> Hi,
>  
> I'm currently getting to grips with least cost routing of messages. As 
> we don't currently have any reliable MCC/MNC lookup facilities, we're 
> having to do this by country prefix.
>  
> As far as I can see there's two ways I can do this: 1. implement 
> preferred-prefix on each SMSC, or 2. put prefix matching in our 
> application to select the SMSC using the smsc variable on the HTTP GET 
> call to Kannel.
>  
> There were discussions previously about building an HLR box for 
> Kannel, to retrieve MCC/MNC from a number using SS7. I've looked at a 
> couple of third parties that offer an HTTP-based lookup of MCC/MNC for 
> approx $0.024 per lookup - but when you're on tight margins as it is 
> that's quite an overhead on the delivery costs.

0.024$ Sounds very expensive for a lookup. We are able to do this but 
we wouldn't charge that much. I once posted such a idea to the kannel 
list and asked if anyone is interested but we had no reply whatsoever 
so we didn't develop the idea any further at that time. It's still easy 
to do for us however.

>  I remember when we discussing this before, Nisan made a valid point 
> that if there was a hash table in Kannel, how often would it need to 
> be refreshed.. We were thinking on a monthly basis, but then if 
> someone ports their number to another network and one of our users 
> just happens to text them 10-15 times a day, we'd potentially end up 
> losing a large chunk of money until their network information is 
> refreshed!

I don't think this is appropriate. The cache should expire within hours 
in my eyes. If you use the location info too (the MSC number) then 
changing the location (going to roam) already makes the routing info 
inappropriate in some cases. For example, if you want to send an SMS to 
my swiss number and I am in france, then you can send it to me over 
Swisscom SMSC but not from other SMSC's while as when I am in 
switzerland, many foreign SMSC's work fine. So knowing that my number 
is a swisscom number is good for 24h but which SMSC link to use to 
deliver the message might change many times during the day.

>  Anyone like to share some thoughts on this whole thing? Stipe you 
> must have experience of this as I imagine you're doing some sort of 
> destination routing for Centrium?
>  
> Alex
>
Andreas Fink
Global Networks Switzerland AG

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