Cost control and why you should use it

Cost control is a feature that allows you to set a fixed list of countries you wish to call , along with a maximum call rate per minute and maximum call spend per day.

This is useful if your deskphone or server or pbx appliance ever gets hacked (and it can happen) - it will not allow the attackers to make calls to high cost destinations.

You can access the cost control in two separate sections in our website:

1. Per whole-account settings:

https://www.multitel.net/settings

(this limits outbound calling regardless what individual PBX or trunk settings you may have):

The above settings will limit your account to a maximum of $0.05/minute call cost , and a maximum of $10 spending per 24 hours interval (not per calendar day).

If you wish to get more granular, click on "Restrict Calling - by country":

The above settings will only allow you to call Canada, Germany, Puerto Rico and the United States.

If the number you are calling is not part of the number plan in these countries, or if the number itself costs more than $0.05/minute , or if your total cost for your calls for the day is more than $10 , the call will be silently dropped (and NOT recorded in the CDRs either). If you wish to get notified about that you would need to go in the previous screen, and set up an alert email address , or an alert mobile number (so we can send you a text message about it) , or a HTTP URL (so we can send a HTTP POST message towards the HTTP URL you have provided).

Example:

If you want to get even fancier, you can also enable the Humbug Labs integration - just click on the "Enable Humbug Labs" button.

You will then have to go to the "Security" tab and edit your Humbug Labs credentials:

While we are on this page , note that you can also prevent your account from purchasing DIDs that cost more than $200 in setup fees , that cost more than $30 in monthly fees, and where the maximum rate per minute is more than $0.50 . This is useful if you have implemented our API and your own customers are using it and you want to prevent them from overspending.

2. Per Hosted PBX setting (these settings will NOT take precedence over what we have discussed above).

This is useful if you are for example a hosted pbx reseller and you want to allow customer XYZ to only call United States , and customer ABC to only call Canada.

You can find this under your Hosted PBX service, under Advanced:

A similar menu as discussed on section 1 will show up once you click on "Cost Control":

These specific settings will allow this Hosted PBX to only call destinations which are at or below $0.01/minute.

If we look in the Restrictions tab, we will see that we have only "United States" there:

This means that whoever is using this Hosted PBX would only be able to call destinations within the United States that are at or below the $0.01/minute rate.

It means they would not be able to call Puerto Rico or Hawaii or Alaska, for example.
If in doubt, you can always consult the coverage page and find out how much a call would cost:

https://multitel.net/coverage/

Another thing you can tweak here is the "Source IP Country". Since we are talking about a Hosted PBX system, we are talking about SIP accounts (each SIP account is an extension, after all).

You can use the "Source IP Country" restriction to only allow (for example) IP addresses from within United States to connect/register to this PBX.

For the purpose of this exercise, we will restrict this Hosted PBX account to only Canada and the United States:

This can get even more granular (where you can restrict a SIP account to a certain IP address only) when you edit an extension within the Hosted PBX.

Example below (restricting this SIP account to only one IP address):

Drilling further down, you can restrict this extension to Canada only -- which means that if the "Allowed IP/Network" is not set, then this account will only be able to register from within Canada:

3. Cost control per IP address or per SIP acccount (Trunk related) .

This can be set in the Trunks section:

Once the "Cost Control" window is open, you will recognize all the settings that we discussed about , above. Again, keep in mind that these settings on the Trunks pages are overwritten by whatever settings you have in your general config , in https://multitel.net/settings

Questions? Please visit https://multitel.net/help , or open up a ticket.