Custom Rate Deck

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At VI, we allow customers to customize their own rate decks. With this feature, you can now look at stats for a specific underlying carrier and remove them from routes if you desire. VoIP Innovations strives to work with only quality vendors whether that be for inbound and outbound calling or ancillary services such as 411, 911, or T.38. We have an internal staff member devoted solely to carrier relations. At times, we have had issues with specific vendors and have severed relationships because they cannot meet the high standards we set forth for our customers. Nevertheless, we also understand that there are sometimes compatibility issues between our customers and our vendors. For example, perhaps your switch is hard-coded to use a Ptime of 30ms but a specific carrier of ours can only use the industry standard of 20ms. As this scenario is ripe for audio issues, having a customizable rate deck on your account solves this problem for you. Similarly, perhaps you are having trouble reaching a specific rural area resulting in Post Dial Delay (PDD). One carrier may be having trouble terminating to one area but otherwise has stellar stats. Rather than VI removing that carrier from all routing, we allow our customers to remove that carrier from only their routing. A customized Rate Deck will allow you to include or exclude certain carriers based on their statistics. Rather than switching to a more expensive rate deck to fix a quality issue, you can now simply exclude a carrier that is having issues.

We have configured the Customizable Rate Deck feature into four defined Presets and three Tiers. Tier One carriers are those carriers that support T.38 and are our top tier carriers. Tier Two carriers are just a step below this and are also considered top tier carriers. Tier Three carriers are what we use for our LCR rate deck. You can choose to block all or only some of the carriers in a specific tier. Keep in mind that all call routing at VI is set for least cost first, meaning that if you wanted to guarantee that your calls only used Tier One carriers, you would need to block tiers two and three. That's not to say that using all three tiers means none of your calls will traverse a Tier One carrier but the calls will be less likely to hit their route due to the higher cost. That is the beauty of the Customizable Rate Deck; we place the choice in your hands. If you are interested in utilizing the custom rate deck, we suggest keeping all carriers in route to start and then adjusting as you monitor your traffic. You can view pricing for the Custom Rate decks under Billing->Packages and Pricing > Termination in the Back Office. Keep in mind that rate increases from our carriers affect the Custom Rate Deck feature. We track these changes for you and keep a history.
You can obtain this information by hovering the Term tab in the Back Office and selecting Custom Rate Deck->Rates. The resulting page will list all the rate deck changes and the date it was modified. You will want to ensure you are viewing the most current information regarding pricing so be aware of this. To view rates, you can click the Download based on the Last Modified date. Since VoIP Innovations bills off LRN for conversational traffic, we suggest obtaining the rate from the LRN Lookup Tool. The Presets we have in place also add a level of control to you. The default

Preset is Standard which includes all carriers in all tiers. The Enterprise Preset includes only Tier One and Tier Two Network carriers and the Premium Preset includes only Tier One Network carriers. We
have also created a fourth Preset labeled LCR. This is for resellers who truly use a Least Cost Routing system. This Preset contains only one carrier for each route. IF that one carrier fails the call, we return a SIP 503 thus failing the call to you for route advancement in your LCR system. Each Preset has a pop-up hover text that describes the preset if you happen to forget this information. Screen shots of these are included below as well.

All VoIP Innovations' customer accounts have the Custom Rate Deck present on their account in the Back Office. If you are interested in utilizing the Custom Rate Deck feature, you can begin doing so at your convenience by following the instructions set forth in this article.
To begin using the Custom Rate Deck on an Endpoint Group, you must first change the
Endpoint Group via the drop-down menu once you have navigated to the desired Endpoint Group. Click the Endpoints tab and select ' Endpoint Group Management'. Click the Endpoint Group name that you want to use for the custom deck. On the next page, use the drop-down menu under the 'Term Rate' column to select 'Customizable'. Finally, click the 'Update Endpoint Group' button to complete the process. As with any change to an Endpoint Group, propagation time is necessary before the change takes effect. Once you have completed the process, you will have additional viewing/configuration options from the 'Term' tab in the Back Office.
To view these options and see the carriers that are currently in route and can be removed, click the Term Tab and select Custom Rate Deck->Manage. The resulting screen will present you with another drop down menu. Only those endpoints configured for the Custom Rate Deck will show in this drop-down menu. Choose the desired endpoint and the data will load. The loaded page will show all carriers separated by tiers. You will see radio button to the right of the page under the column Status. To remove any carrier from your list, simply select the Inactive radio button and click the 'Save Changes' button. Once propagation has occurred, that carrier will be removed from your routes. You can make multiple changes before clicking the 'Save Changes' button as well. If you wish to remove the tier, change the radio button to the appropriate Preset. Choosing the Premium Preset will remove both tiers two and three whereas choosing the Enterprise Preset will only disable Tier Three carriers.

You will notice for each carrier regardless of tier, that we provide a set of metrics that help you in your decision making. The first header is 'Network' and is the name VoIP Innovations' underlying carrier. Providing the carrier name provides insight into our network to our customers and makes it easier for you to make your choices when utilizing the customizable rate deck. The other columns are as follows.
PDD: Post Dial Delay (For that carrier on this Endpoint; this is a Month to Date stat)
MTD Calls: Month to Date Calls (Number of attempted calls from this Endpoint)
Completed MTD: Completed Calls Month to Date (Number of calls that completed from this Endpoint)
Minutes MTD: Minutes Month to Date (Minutes billed for calls from this Endpoint)
Cost MTD: Cost Month to Date (Amount billed by VI for calls from this Endpoint)
ASR: Actual Seizure Rate (Percentage of calls that had normal call clearing; SIP 200 OK)
ACD: Average Call Duration (In seconds, the average duration for all completed calls)
Avg. Cost: (Average Cost of ALL calls from this Endpoint)

One thing you will want to keep in mind when viewing statistics is the ASR column. We caution you to not jump to conclusions regarding ASR as there can be many reasons for low ASR and does not necessarily point to a carrier problem. Since ASR is calculated by calls that have normal call clearing, it is possible that the results can be skewed. For example, SIP responses such as 487 (Origination Cancel) and 486 (Busy Here) are normal responses and not considered a problem. A 487 could simply mean there was a Ring-No-Answer and would therefore not be a problem. It's also possible you could have low ASR due to improperly formatted headers or an invalid ANI that some of carriers will overlook and others will not. We suggest investigating further into your side of things if you believe the ASR is inexplicably low.
We believe the two most important metrics for the Custom Rate Decks are PDD and Average Cost so we provide these in text format as well as a graph. You can see this text when you click the Term tab and select Custom Rate Deck->Manage. To see a graphical representation, click the Term tab and select Custom Rate Deck->Monitor.
We also believe it is important to keep a history of any changes made in the Custom Rate Deck so you may go back and view these if you like. This history includes any carriers that have been removed (or put back) as well as any changes to the Presets. To view a history of the changes made, select the Term tab and select Custom Rate Deck->History. The resulting screen provides filters you can use to narrow your search. You can search by Network, Presets, Endpoint Group, and the Back-Office user who made the change. You can also search by a specified date range. Keep in
mind that you set the Custom Rate Deck on a per Endpoint Group basis so the history and metrics will be for a specified EPG.

Once you have begun using the custom rate deck and have data to view, you can begin using this data as you see fit. Maybe slightly higher PDD is acceptable to you to keep the cost low, or maybe after thorough investigation you find that a carrier has low ASR that is unwarranted. You can remove these carriers if you so choose and monitor the data to look for improvement. Another thing to appreciate about the custom rate deck feature is that you can remove carriers and put them back at will.

Customers using the Custom Rate Deck will see a 'Network' column for current and archived CDRs. The network column will list the 'Term Carrier' that completed that call. While you are certainly able to remove a carrier if you cannot complete one call, this is not the intent of the custom rate deck. Nevertheless, you could check your current or archived CDRs to find a problematic call and remove that carrier as outlined above.


To get started with Custom Rate Decks, begin by setting the Term Rate for an Endpoint Group to 'Customizable' by following the below instructions

Click Endpoints and Endpoint Group Management from the menu


Click the name of the endpoint group you wish to edit. Setting an Endpoint Group to the Custom option is a three-step process. You will need to validate this change by clicking 'OK' on the pop-up and clicking the 'Update Endpoint Group' button.

After setting the 'Term Rate' to 'Customizable', select the Term tab and select Manage from the menu


On the resulting page use the drop-down menu once more to select the desired group for customization


After selecting the desired Endpoint Group, use the 'Presets' and carrier radio buttons to configure according to your needs/experience

To use outbound international calling with the customizable rate deck, you MUST have the
"Standard with International" preset selected.