RATE PROVISIONING FOR INTERNET TELEPHONY CLEARINGHOUSE SYSTEM

摘要

A rate provisioning method and system of the present invention utilizes a rate table with pre-assigned cells that may be used by both IP bandwidth providers (partners) and IP bandwidth customers (retail IP service providers). The rate table enables its users to enter information about their IP Telephony preferences, including pricing criteria. This information can be used by an IP call-routing engine to provide the originating gateway operators with a prioritized list of terminating gateways whose pricing criteria match those set by the originating gateway operators. The rate table of the present invention can be created with an ordinary spreadsheet computer program. After entering information into the pre-assigned cells of the rate table, a rate table can be saved in a file format that preserves the relative locations of the pre-assigned cells of the rate table. One such format is the CSV (comma separated values) format that can be used as a portable representation of the rate table.