Customers are logical entities in the system usually representing some termination partners, resellers of a service, or a virtual Customer for keeping track of pre-paid cards distributed by the company. A Customer can have several Accounts associated with it. These Accounts may represent individual users of a product, such as pre-paid cards, or may identify different SIP UAs (e.g. phones or individual ports in multi-port devices) belonging to the same Customer.
Customers are organized hierarchically so that one customer may “own” one or more sub-customers.
There are two basic types of customers: Root Customer and all other customers. They differ by the fact that Root Customer doesn't have any other upper-level Customers who “owns” him. For that reason, Root Customer either directly or via his sub-customers bills other customers in the system. It usually represents owner of the switch. Unlike any other Customer in the system the Root Customer isn’t billed for the calls his accounts or sub-customers make. Also, by default only Root Customer has a right to view and/or modify system-wide parameters, such as for example routing configuration, though he/she can delegate some of those rights to selected sub-Customers via Permissions.
Customer could be, for example, a company with an account for each employee. The company will be invoiced for all usage, and the Softswitch will charge the company for the total, but the company will be able to see details of the usage for each account and bill them if necessary.
The following figure illustrates this concept:
Here you can see the system with 5 Customers, and 3 hierarchy levels. It should be noted that the system doesn’t allow a Customer to see any other customers above it, so that there is no way that the Customer D for example will be able to tell that there are some other levels above the Customer A.