Next Generation Telephony Systems and Services

DataTechLabs Crossbow Exchange Engine is intelligent routing and rating platform allowing service Providers to act as VoIP Traffic exchange Operators. It allows Traffic Sellers to sell their routes and Traffic Buyers to view and buy routes according to their desired quality and price requirements. It optimizes routing of each call based on the buyers bidding criteria. Software comes with pre-populated country and operator breakouts for almost 1,000 destinations, including some weekend and off peak sensitive markets.

Destinations and Markets are preloaded in Crossbow Exchange and are system-wide. It makes uniform environment for all members participating in the Exchange: i.e. same country codes and descriptions, same billing increments and same start and end times of weekend and off-peak traffic. There are more than 900 destinations pre-loaded in the Crossbow Exchange. The list is being currently updated from publicly available sources. It supports grouping Destinations into groups, for example: "UK-Mobile-Vodafone" and "UK-Mobile-Orange" are separate Destinations but also forms Destination Group named "UK-Mobile". Therefore they can be traded both separately or as a group. Some of Destinations may have time-sensitive trading, i.e. Peak, Off-peak and Weekend trading. Crossbow Exchange Engine supports this function as well. It is possible to define fixed start and end times of peak and off peak rates based on specific time zone of Destination country.

There are two type of actions available to exchange members:

• Selling, or Offer posting
• Buying, or Bid posting

Each of the members can be simultaneously Seller or Buyer or both.

Sellers post offers on the exchange and configure their equipment to receive traffic from Exchange. They can post their offers to one of predefined markets and specify asking price.

Buyers should configure their equipment to send traffic to the exchange. They buy traffic by placing bids. Two types of bids are available:

• Price: A buyer places a bid for the maximum amount they are willing to pay for a route. Calls are routed to the least expensive seller with an available route to the bid amount;
• Quality and Price: A buyer places a bid for the maximum amount they are willing to pay for a route and the minimum quality they are willing to accept. Quality is measured by multiplying the Answer Seizure Ratio (ASR) by the Average Call Duration (ACD) to calculate the Score. Calls are routed to the seller with the highest Score at or below the bid amount.

Exchange makes it profit from fees collected from buyers and sellers. Two types of fees are available and configurable by operator:

• Fee based on traded minute price. Various levels are supported. For example:
  • Destinations with offer price up to $0.05 - fee $0.002
  • Destinations with offer price between $0.05 and $0.10 - fee $0.003
  • Destinations with offer price between $0.10 and $0.50 - fee $0.0045
  • Destinations with offer price above $0.10 - fee $0.006
  • and so on ...
  This fee can have billing increment different from that of particular destination. For example, calls can be traded with 1/1 increments, whereas fees - at 60/60.
• Fee based on percentage. Fixed percentage from sales amount;

Billing cycle can be set at desired dates of month, for example bi-monthly; on 1st and 16th of each month. It affects way how reports are presented, i.e. they are bound to billing cycles. Buying Member is required to maintain positive balance in order to make traffic purchases. Crossbow engine allows to refill balance at any time buy making payments. Balance increases also when member has done some sales of traffic. Balance settlements and payments are done exclusively through the exchange, no peer to peer transactions are supported. At the end of each billing cycle system sends out automatic period balance statement with opening balance, closing balance and all activities during billing cycle. User can also make use of automated notification system which informs about low balance (user selectable level) and absence of funds in account.

Routing decisions are made in real time and new offers/bids are included into routing immediately as they are activated. At each call attempt, Crossbow Exchange tries to route call to all matched offers for particular bid, starting from most appropriate. If match is found, call is connected. If none of offers match, call will fail.

Exchange administrator can select whether to activate Route Quality Protection feature for particular Exchange member. When activated, this system will monitor user's routes and if quality criteria is not met (Score = ACD x ASR), will exclude route from routing for defined number of hours. Member is requested to fix this route in this time. Score and number of hours are configurable by each user.

In order to simplify participation in trading for users willing to buy many destinations, Bid-less routing feature is implemented. It allows to route any call received on Crossbow Exchange to route to cheapest destination in case when there is no bid placed. This saves lot of manual work of entering lots of bids.

Crossbow Exchange Engine includes all tools necessary to build complete website. Easy template-driven system allows quickly put desired layout in place. Pages can be easily added and removed.

Following tools are included:

• Registration form. Users are requested to enter their details and can receive automated response with instructions and/or pricelists, etc. Exchange owner receives notification of signup. Users info is stored in database;
• Newsletter. system can send out automated information about new added offers and bids. Also can include "hot" offers, i.e. prices of most popular trading destinations for given period (example, week). Newsletter can be sent either to existing users or those registered in web or both.