Sippy’s Loss Protection, Average Call Duration and Margin Based Routing



Sippy’s Loss Protection and Average Call Duration serve important logical duties, relating to Profit Protection and Margin Based Routing. These are parameters configured under your Tariff’s ‘Advanced Parameters’ title. Sippy makes logical calculations based on Loss Protection %, your Average Call Duration specified value and Rate of call versus supplier cost of Route. This will have Sippy either block calls or pass the call to the next available connection as specified in your Routing Entries list.


  • Your Loss Protection %, can be a "+" or a "-" value, determining your willingness to allow calls to pass at a loss or with guaranteed margin. Configuring Loss Protection to a negative value, with Least Cost Routing Policy enabled, configures your Margin Based Routing threshold. A Loss Protection value of -10% will have Sippy pass the call through the connection with least cost, though with a margin of at least 10%. With a positive value, Sippy will allow routing to tariffs that will result in a lower charge to your customer than your total cost of call. This can be an important feature when selling products with loss leader tariffs, to provide your customers with great offers to some destinations.


 



  • The Average Call Duration when considering Tariffs, does not relate to ACD (Average Call Duration) call length statistics of routed calls. It is an arbitrary value specified by the operator to have Sippy perform some pre-determined call calculations. Average Call Duration of tariff, serves two significant profit or loss protection purposes.



The Average Call Duration of a Tariff is a secondary profit or loss protection feature to Max Loss, %. By configuring your desired value in seconds in ‘Average Call Duration’, Sippy performs pre-connection calculations resulting in the customer’s potential cost of call. This potential is presumed by calculating the Average Call Duration value (default 200 seconds), multiplied by destination tariff. The calculation will also encompass additional call billing components as listed in the Tariff, such as Connect Fee, Post Call Surcharge, and Free Seconds. If the customer does not have enough funds in their account for the call according to the calculation, Sippy will block this call (see Sample Case 1).


Additionally, the Average call duration also performs as profit protection in the case when there are lots of calls established at the same time through one Account. Sippy will enable one session to connect, reserving sufficient available credit for this call. In the case that a second simultaneous session from the same Account is attempted, Sippy will reject this call due to the insufficient fund potential (see Sample Case 2).


    Sample case 1:
      • Prepaid Account ‘A’ has $0.15 credit
      • Prefix 123 is dialed, with a rate of $0.1/min
      • At $0.1/min, Account A will potentially have 90 seconds worth of call. ($0.15/$0.1=1.5min=90sec)
      • However, if Average Call Duration is set to 100 seconds, Sippy will block this call before the termination can take place.


    Sample case 2:
    • Prepaid Account ‘A’ has $0.18 credit
    • Prefix 123 is dialed, with a rate of $0.05/min
    • Average call duration on account has been set to 200s (default value)
    • First caller would be able to do 3 minutes and 36 seconds of calling at max
    • System reserves the cost of 200 seconds to this destination from the account’s balance.The amount of money available for the next caller to make the call would be ~ 0.0133333 USD. After that the new caller won’t have the possibility of making the calls to the same destination until the first caller finishes his call and the balance would be recalculated
    • The second call attempt to this destination will be rejected by Sippy till the first call is done or the balance has been topped up.