1.4.7 Wholesale clients

This type of accounts is intended for the clients who send wholesale traffic. They are usually carriers which terminate calls through your system. You can then send the traffic further to other carriers or to your own PSTN gateways. The wholesale client type is used also to add providers or gateways which are DIDs (SIP trunks) sources.

There are several distinctions in the wholesale type of accounts which include:

• Wholesale accounts do not use the additional features such as voicemail, answering rules, PUSH
• Wholesale type supports authentication by IP address and/or by the digest method
• Wholesale accounts are used as access numbers for calling card services
• Wholesale accounts are used for inbound DID services (trunks from DID carriers)
• Wholesale type has usually much fewer client accounts as it operates in carrier to carrier model

The main Wholesale clients panel contains the search component using which you can look for a specific client or group of clients.

The edit mode panel is divided into three tabs:

• General
• Profile
• Advanced

The content of the tabs comprises of functions described in the Common operations chapter.

The difference is in the specific authentication method available only for this client type, namely the IP address based authentication which is the most common method in wholesale operations.  It is because the originating traffic comes from carrier softswitches or PTSN gateways which are rather on static IP addresses. By allowing only certain addresses we block access from all other endpoints thus making the whole platform more secure.

If the client sends from multiple addresses or from a range you can add them in the IP addresses table.

Besides the IP authentication the SIP username and password (digest) authentication can be used. To enable this option you need to tick on the relevant option in the Settings\System\General. This option can also be set per client account in the Advanced tab.

There are two other options specific to this client type, both in the Advanced tab:

Charge for inbound calls – when ticked the system will be charging the receiver for the inbound calls, that is the calls coming through this wholesale client and routed to a retail type client. It can be used in DIDs scenarios.

Enable calling cards – when on, the calls from that client can be routed to the voipbox calling card’s scenarios. Otherwise they will be rejected with 404 error.