mod_nibblebill

About

mod_nibblebill is a credit/debit module for FreeSWITCH™. The module was initially written by Darren Schreiber to fill the gaps of a professional grade trunking system that lacked the ability to detect fraud real-time. It's purpose is to allow real-time debiting of credit or cash from a database while calls are in progress. It had the following goals:

Debit credit/cash from accounts real-time
Allow for billing at different rates during a single call
Allow for warning callers when their balance is low (via audio, in-channel)
Allow for disconnecting or re-routing calls when balance is depleted
Allow billing functions listed above to operate with multiple concurrent calls

Variables

These channel variables can be set in the user's directory entry or in a dialplan entry as the call is routed.

nibble_account — Account number to debit for this call

nibble_increment — Minimum time, in seconds, which can be billed at the amount specified by nibble_rate

nibble_minimum — Fixed minimum amount to charge for the call, in addition to the nibble_rate

nibble_rate — Amount of money to debit from the account after each increment elapses

nibble_rounding — Number of decimal places to which the total billed amount will be rounded at the end of the call before the minimum charge, if any, is applied.

nibble_total_billed — (read-only) Total amount of money to be debited from the account after the call is terminated

Use Cases

Debit (Pre-pay)

You can allow people to put cash into an account and "nibble" away at it. In addition, when callers have almost depleted their account, a tone or other message can play (or another action can occur) warning the caller of this.

Upon full depletion of their account, the call can either be transferred to an extension that allows them to recharge their balance via touch-tones or otherwise, or the call can simply be disconnected.

Credit (Post-pay)

If your database column allows it, you can make the warning and out-of-cash thresholds a negative number. In this manner, callers can "dip into" negative numbers in the database, and then you can bill them after their usage. In this way, you are also able to protect yourself from abuse, since callers will still be terminated if they go below some (negative) threshold you set (i.e. spent too much money in a month).

This is a more typical approach to billing for landlines and it allows for an account to automatically be cut-off if excessive usage occurs without someone paying their bill.

Pay-Per-Call Service Billing

You could bill for providing a special service, either via fixed fee or via per-minute after a certain event (entering a credit card number and being approved, for example)

Maximum Credit and/or Fraud Prevention

You can setup a credit field that gets depleted by your users, similar to pre-pay above, but just not tell them about it. When they deplete all their credit for a day/week/month/etc. they can't make any more calls. You can use an external script to deposit more credit into their account at a pre-set interval.

This would allow something like "100 minutes a day free" or other such promotions to work.

Design Goals

Concurrent design - allows for supervision of multiple in-progress channels that belong to the same account/account code
Scalability - allow for different heartbeat intervals (or turning off supervision during calls altogether). This allows the administrator to tweak checks depending on system load
Flexibility - allow warning levels and "out-of-funds" levels to be flexible on a global and per-user basis, and allow customization as to what happens when the caller is out of funds
Customizable - all settings should be customizable, including when people are terminated or warned and what happens when they are terminated or warned

Installation and Configuration

mod_nibblebill is now part of the main FreeSWITCH source tree. It requires ODBC support to function properly.

To install mod_nibblebill:

Uncomment applications/mod_nibblebill in modules.conf (in the source tree)
Recompile FreeSWITCH with ODBC support. For more information on compiling FreeSWITCH with core ODBC support, see Using ODBC in the core
Modify the nibblebill settings in conf/autoload_configs/nibblebill.conf.xml . The settings should be self-explanatory.

You must edit this file with your database information.

A sample dsn for a PostgresSQL database would be as follows:

PostgreSQL DSN

<param name="db_dsn" value="pgsql://hostaddr=serverip dbname=dbname user=uname password="/>

Enable mod_nibblebill in your FreeSWITCH installation by adding it to conf/autoload_config/modules.conf.xml like so:

modules.conf.xml

<load module="mod_nibblebill"/>

Start/restart FreeSWITCH™.

Note that you can also load and unload mod_nibblebill from the FreeSWITCH CLI. Just type "load mod_nibblebill" or "unload mod_nibblebill".

Database Tables

Per your configuration file (see nibblebill.conf.xml), make sure you have an ODBC database driver and database that is accessible and contains the correct database, table, and column names.

An example of an existing table follows.

MySQL Schema

mysql> use tcapi;
mysql> select * from accounts;
+--------+--------------+---------+
| id     | name         | cash    |
+--------+--------------+---------+
| 1      | Darren       | 41.4161 |
| 2      | Joe          | 50      |
| 9      | tester9      | 50      |
| 10     | tester10     | 44.8213 |
| 837269 | My Company   | 50      |
+--------+--------------+---------+
5 rows in set (0.00 sec)

In the above example, a table named "accounts" exists in the database "tcapi". That table contains id and cash columns for use by the billing script. id represents the account code, and cash represents the amount of money the user is allowed to spend. The corresponding settings in your nibblebill.conf.xml file for the above setup would be:

nibblebill.conf.xml

<param name="odbc-dsn" value="pgsql://db_ip/db_name"/>
<param name="db_table" value="accounts"/>
<param name="db_column_cash" value="cash"/>
<param name="db_column_account" value="id"/>

Creating PostgreSQL Table

PostgreSQL

create table accounts (
	id bigserial not null,
	name varchar( 256 ),
	cash double precision not null
);

Creating MySQL Table

MySQL Schema

CREATE TABLE accounts (
	id int NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
	name VARCHAR(255),
	cash double precision NOT NULL
);

Billing a Call

Nibble Method

This is the default method of billing and is based on the concept of a FreeSWITCH™ heartbeat. For every X seconds, we deduct Y amount from an account.

To bill a call, you must set a minimum of two variables on an in-progress channel. The variables are nibble_rate and nibble_account. As a neat feature, mod_nibblebill doesn't really care where you set the billing variables, as long as they exist before a hangup occurs. That means you can set them in the dialplan, in the directory, in a Lua script - wherever.

In its simplest form, you can add this to a user's directory entry:

conf/directory/default/1000.xml

<variable name="nibble_rate" value="0.03"/>
<variable name="nibble_account" value="18238"/>

Now that user will be billed $0.03/minute for every call made or received, against account 18238.

By default, a heartbeat is set at 60 seconds. This means that every 60 seconds, US$0.03 is deducted from their account. Note that all mathematical calculations are done using FreeSWITCH™'s internal microseconds counters. This means a few things:

If a heartbeat does not fire exactly on-time you will get a fraction of a cent billed. You should make sure your underlying database can support that.
Counters count the time in between ticks exactly. There is no "lost" billing.

You can modify the heartbeat interval globally with this parameter:

<param name="global_heartbeat" value="300">

That would make the heartbeat fire every 300 seconds, or every 5 minutes. Heartbeats can go as often as every second, though this is really not wise, as you're making a database call every second, per channel.

You can set the desired billing increment in seconds using "nibble_increment" variable. The logic follows:

if time < increment {
	billing = increment 
} else { 
	billing = ceil(time/increment) * increment
}

To set billing increment to 30 seconds set variable like:

<variable name="nibble_increment" value="30" />

Whole Call Billing

It is possible to use this module without heartbeats enabled. That means you just bill a call at the end of the call. You set the same variables as listed above, but you also set one additional variable in your nibblebill.conf.xml file:

<param name="global_heartbeat" value="off">

By doing this, billing will only occur at the end of a call (on hangup). The time calculation will be from when the call was answered until the end of the call. If a call is never answered, billing is skipped.

The formula used to bill calls when this parameter is set is:

[time call ended] - [time call answered] x [rate per minute] = $total bill rate

This method does not allow for any supervision of a call in progress, meaning fraud can occur and people can go over their allotted limits.

Examples

Different Rates per User

It is possible to have different rates per minute, per user. This can work IN ADDITION to the dialplan examples listed below, as long as you don't clobber the variables. Here's an example.

Let's say you have two users - one is billed at $0.05/minute and one at $0.10/minute. Neither is billed when calling an 800 number. You would setup their directory entries like this:

Per-user rates

<user id="dschreiber">
	<params>
		<param name="password" value="1234"/>
	</params>
	<variables>
		<variable name="nibble_rate" value="0.05"/>
		<variable name="nibble_account" value="8182"/>
		<variable name="default_areacode" value="415"/>
		<variable name="toll_allow" value="domestic,international,local"/>
		<variable name="user_context" value="default"/>
	</variables>
</user>

<user id="expensive_guy">
	<params>
		<param name="password" value="1234"/>
	</params>
	<variables>
		<variable name="nibble_rate" value="0.10"/>
		<variable name="nibble_account" value="2932"/>
		<variable name="default_areacode" value="212"/>
		<variable name="toll_allow" value="domestic,international,local"/>
		<variable name="user_context" value="default"/>
	</variables>
</user>

Then in your dialplan, override the bill rates for toll-free calls only:

Toll-free override

<extension name="tollfree800">
	<condition field="destination_number" expression="^1{0,1}(800\d{7})$">
		<action application="set" data="nibble_rate=0"/>
		<action application="bridge" data="sofia/gateway/bandwidth.com/$1"/>
	</condition>
</extension>

All non-800 number calls will be billed at the rates set on the user's account, while toll-free calls will be billed 0 (equivalent to no billing).

Single Rate for all Users

On your user accounts:

User directory

<include>
	<user id="diegoviola">
		<params>
			<param name="password" value="1234"/>
		</params>
		<variables>
			<variable name="toll_allow" value="domestic,international,local"/>
			<variable name="user_context" value="default"/>
			<variable name="nibble_account" value="1"/>
		</variables>
	</user>
</include>


<include>
	<user id="dschreiber">
		<params>
			<param name="password" value="1234"/>
		</params>
		<variables>
			<variable name="toll_allow" value="domestic,international,local"/>
			<variable name="user_context" value="default"/>
			<variable name="nibble_account" value="2"/>
		</variables>
	</user>
</include>

On the extension you want to bill:

Dialplan

<extension name="outbound">
	<condition field="destination_number" expression="^9(\d{10,})$">
		<action application="set" data="nibble_rate=0.05"/>
		<action application="set" data="$${nibble_account}"/>
		<action application="bridge" data="sofia/gateway/teliax/$1"/>
	</condition>
</extension>

Different Rates per Area Code

This example bills all calls at $0.05/minute, except calls to area code 919 which are $0.07/minute and calls to 800 numbers, which are free. Calls are billed to whatever account code is set for the user in their directory profile.

In this example I set the rate from the dialplan. Be careful! This overrides the rate variable set on the user/directory level.

Dialplan

<extension name="tollfree800">
	<condition field="destination_number" expression="^1{0,1}(800\d{7})$">
		<action application="set" data="nibble_account=${accountcode}"/>
		<action application="set" data="nibble_rate=0"/>
		<action application="bridge" data="sofia/gateway/bandwidth.com/$1"/>
	</condition>
</extension>


<extension name="special919rate">
	<condition field="destination_number" expression="^1{0,1}(919\d{7})$">
		<action application="set" data="nibble_account=${accountcode}"/>
		<action application="set" data="nibble_rate=0.07"/>
		<action application="bridge" data="sofia/gateway/bandwidth.com/$1"/>
	</condition>
</extension>


<extension name="domestic">
	<condition field="destination_number" expression="^(1{0,1}\d{10})$">
		<action application="set" data="nibble_account=${accountcode}"/>
		<action application="set" data="nibble_rate=0.05"/>
		<action application="bridge" data="sofia/gateway/bandwidth.com/$1"/>
	</condition>
</extension>

Different Rates Per Service Delivery

This is kind of neat, and not yet baked. But it can be used today. There will be more advances with this.

This idea encompasses the concept of changing the nibble_rate while the call is in progress.

The current "catch" is that you must flush the current call's accumulated billing to the database before the call's rate changes. This will write out any billed seconds since the last query to DB with the old rate.

In the meantime, here's the idea... A caller could call-in and for the first part of their call they might be getting billed at $1.00/minute, maybe to talk to Tier 1 support. If they need Tier 2 support, the rate goes to $5.00/minute. The rate changes when the call is transferred, simply by changing the variable. You can even set the amount to 0 while the caller is on hold or in a FIFO queue.

Dialplan

<extension name="tier1">
	<condition field="destination_number" expression="^2000$">
		<!-- Save anything billed at a previous rate -->
		<action application="nibblebill" data="flush"/>
		<!-- Change the rate -->
		<action application="set" data="nibble_rate=1.00"/>
		<!-- Transfer to Tier1 rep -->
		<action application="transfer" data="1000 XML default"/>
	</condition>
</extension>

<extension name="tier2">
	<condition field="destination_number" expression="^2000$">
		<!-- Save anything billed at a previous rate -->
		<action application="nibblebill" data="flush"/>
		<!-- Change the rate -->
		<action application="set" data="nibble_rate=5.00"/>
		<!-- Transfer to Tier2 rep -->
		<action application="transfer" data="1001 XML default"/>
	</condition>
</extension>

Another possible use of this is to bill a caller while they're talking to support, but to stop billing after the call when you give them a survey. Same concept as above, but done this way:

<extension name="survey-after-call">
	<condition field="destination_number" expression="^2000$">
		<!-- Handle support request here at $1.00/minute via extension 1001 -->
		<action application="set" data="nibble_rate=1.00"/>
		<action application="set" data="hangup_after_bridge=false"/> 
		<action application="bridge" data="sofia/internal/1001@$${domain}"/>
		<action application="nibblebill" data="flush"/>
		<!-- Set rate to 0, then transfer caller to the survey IVR -->
		<action application="set" data="nibble_rate=0.00"/>
		<action application="bridge" data="sofia/internal/1002@$${domain}"/>
	</condition>
</extension>

Hangup Call When Balance Depleted

When the balance of an account drops below the setting you have specified in the configuration for "nobal_amt", the call gets transferred to an extension of your choice. This allows you to play a message such as "Your call has been terminated due to insufficient funds." Since we're really just transferring the call to an extension and suspending billing, you could get fancy and potentially make the user key in their credit card number to add funds.

In your conf/autoload_configs/nibblebill.conf.xml add something like this:

nibblebill.conf.xml

<!-- By default, terminate a caller when their balance hits $0.00. You can set this to a negative number. -->
<param name="nobal_amt" value="0"/>
<param name="nobal_action" value="hangup XML default"/>

In this example, note the nobal_action of "hangup XML default". This tells mod_nibblebill to transfer the call to the extension named "hangup" in the default context of your XML dialplan when the balance reaches the nobal_amt threshold. You can then add this to your dialplan:

Extension hangup

<extension name="hangup">
	<condition field="destination_number" expression="^(hangup)$">
		<action application="playback" data="no_more_funds.wav"/>
		<action application="hangup"/>
	</condition>
</extension>

In this example, when a caller's balance reaches zero their call will be transferred to the hangup extension. That extension will play a message stating that they are out of funds (assuming you record a sound file named no_more_funds.wav) and the call will disconnect.

Note carefully that the B leg currently also gets transferred to the same extension. If you don't like this behaviour, tell me, and I'll make a new flag :).

API Commands

The following commands can be used from the dialplan, CLI, or API. The syntax is basically the same for each, with the somewhat obvious difference being that applications are in the format:

Dialplan format

<action application="nibblebill" data="action [params]">

Whereas CLI and API commands are just:

API format

nibblebill <channel-uuid> <action> [params]

Check

Inserting this in your application or using it on the CLI with a UUID returns the balance that has been billed so far. This does not include any increments not yet written to the database.

<action application="nibblebill" data="check"/>