We’re pleased to announce the latest incremental upgrade to our market-leading Customer API which adds a range of useful new tools including;
- Trunk Management
- Event Notifications
- Live Call Rates
- Call Cost Control for NTS
Trunk Management
It is now possible to manage your Simwood SIP Trunks by API, including many of the tasks you previously would have raised a ticket with our support team for, such as adding and removing IP addresses.
In addition to this it is possible to create trunks which use SIP Authentication instead of IP-based authentication (NB: This is not the same as SIP Registration for inbound traffic, which we do not support) supporting use of multiple trunks on the same host – this is useful where you provide shared ‘hosted PBX’ options to your customers or where customers want to make use of others’ hosted PBX offerings.
For our customers which manage customer equipment (e.g. PBX installers) this also gives you the option to have your customer equipment connect directly to the simwood network, whilst still giving you controls over their traffic and without the requirement to associate a customer site IP with your account.
Event Notifications
It’s important that you know about any changes to your account, so we’ve introduced the concept of event notifications into the API. This is in it’s early stages and is used initially only with the Trunk Management API discussed above, ensuring you’re kept informed of any changes such as the removal or deletion of IPs, and to provide an audit trail and confirmation of any changes made.
Through time we will add more events you can subscribe to and you can choose to receive your events either by HTTP POST, eMail or by SMS, more notification options will be available in the future.
Live Call Rates
It’s always useful to know what a call will cost in advance, and we’ve now made rate information for any specific number available directly in the API. Due to the fast and lightweight nature of our API and unique backend this is suitable to include in your own LCR and routing (e.g. via an Asterisk AGI) – you could also use this in conjunction with our Advanced Call Cost Control when allowing customers to subscribe to NTS services, by providing realtime feedback of whether the call will be allowed.
Call Cost Control (NTS)
We recently introduced our Advanced Call Cost Control SIP Headers – allowing our wholesale SIP users to set custom limits on call costs per call. Now when configuring a number to divert to the PSTN via our API you can set a per minute and connection cost limit on the B leg of these calls.
There are a number of applications for this – such as ensuring calls to your revenue sharing numbers are only forwarded when commercially viable. So, for example, by setting the max cost per minute to 0.025 you’d ensure numbers are not forwarded to loss-making destinations.
You can also reduce the risk of your numbers being used fraudulently by setting a default max cost per minute, for example you may want to limit your customers to forwarding calls to destinations costing no more than 5p/min unless they’ve arranged a higher limit in advance – this can be easily achieved by setting a max cost per minute / max connection cost on every route that’s higher than the rate to your most popular destinations.
Future Developments
We are very proud of our API and believe it offers a level of control over your own account unsurpassed by any other Wholesale SIP provider and are committed to continuously improving and upgrading the services we offer.
If there’s anything else you’d like to see exposed via the API, or if you have any other ideas on how to use our services, please get in touch.
The latest version of our API documentation is available here
