For the love of god and all that is holy, why do you not include your US
rates in your ratesheets? I don't care that each customer gets a different
rate, if you can terminate calls worth your salt, you can hire someone to
write a script that includes the rate for the customer in your rate sheets.
It's fine if one has to get the rate sheet via a URL like this:
(Bonus -- If I'm logged into your site, username/password isn't required!)
I don't mind! I don't even mind if I have to sign up for free to GET your
A-Z rates! I _DO_ mind having to update US rates by hand while I can
automate the updating of rates using your published rate sheet!
The United States is a country too -- stop thinking about all the other
countries separately from your A-Z rate sheet and leaving out the US
because it is, for you, not International. You can't know what your
customer thinks is International!
So do me a favor -- figure out how to publish your rates on a per-customer
basis, so we can automatically update rates from your site, and so that we
can maybe even automatically send you more traffic when you put a
destination on sale!
Beckman
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Beckman Internet Guy
beckman@angryox.comhttp://www.angryox.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
--Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com--
For the love of god and all that is holy, why do you not include
your US
rates in your ratesheets? I don't care that each customer gets a
different
rate, if you can terminate calls worth your salt, you can hire
someone to
write a script that includes the rate for the customer in your rate
sheets.
It's fine if one has to get the rate sheet via a URL like this:
(Bonus -- If I'm logged into your site, username/password isn't
required!)
I don't mind! I don't even mind if I have to sign up for free to
GET your
A-Z rates! I _DO_ mind having to update US rates by hand while I can
automate the updating of rates using your published rate sheet!
The United States is a country too -- stop thinking about all the
other
countries separately from your A-Z rate sheet and leaving out the US
because it is, for you, not International. You can't know what your
customer thinks is International!
So do me a favor -- figure out how to publish your rates on a per-
customer
basis, so we can automatically update rates from your site, and so
that we
can maybe even automatically send you more traffic when you put a
destination on sale!
Beckman
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Beckman
Internet Guy
beckman@angryox.comhttp://www.angryox.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter -
You're doing your domain name proud! ;-)
It is almost always contradictory to provider's best interests to
make their rate sheets easy to import or understand. Here's a
document set that I wrote a while back in the hopes that I could beat
providers up into giving me the correct rate table data in a format I
could use:
---
John Todd email:jtodd@digium.com
Digium, Inc. | Asterisk Open Source Community Director
445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville AL 35806 - USA
direct: +1-256-428-6083 http://www.digium.com/
_______________________________________________
--Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com--
--- On Fri, 4/24/09, John Todd <jtodd@digium.com> wrote:
Quote:
It is almost always contradictory to provider's best
interests to make their rate sheets easy to import or understand.
Why is that? I'd think that on the contrary- they'd want you
to have an easily importable ratesheet so you can send more
traffic to them. Of course- this only holds true if their
rates are competitive...
Of course, I'm to blame too- we don't have such ratesheet
readily available. Have to work on that one... lol.
On Fri, 2009-04-24 at 14:35 -0700, John Todd wrote:
Quote:
It is almost always contradictory to provider's best interests to
make their rate sheets easy to import or understand. Here's a
document set that I wrote a while back in the hopes that I could beat
providers up into giving me the correct rate table data in a format I
could use:
I dunno, if people are providing a good service at a fair price, then
its in the providers interest to make it easier, not harder, for more
people to get that info and thus use that provider. The higher the
hurdles are for a customer to work with the provider, the fewer total
customers that provider is going to have.
I for example will not sign an NDA to get a rate list, so any provider
that asks for one is immediately ruled out - and I am not the only
one.
Even if the service is more expensive, if the quality, support, etc is
there, people will pay the higher price. Perhaps not everyone, but that
gives providers the opportunity to have a tiered or multi-branded setup.
For example a wholesale backend with 2 or more front ends, one with a
higher price, with only quality routes, functioning caller id, and a
support team that can be contacted quickly and easily, and another that
is only for people that look at price and care little about any of the
other stuff. They can even look like they are competing with
themselves, and let the consumer decide what level of service they want
and get more customers.
For the love of god and all that is holy, why do you not include your US
rates in your ratesheets? I don't care that each customer gets a different
rate, if you can terminate calls worth your salt, you can hire someone to
write a script that includes the rate for the customer in your rate sheets.
It's fine if one has to get the rate sheet via a URL like this:
(Bonus -- If I'm logged into your site, username/password isn't required!)
I don't mind! I don't even mind if I have to sign up for free to GET your
A-Z rates! I _DO_ mind having to update US rates by hand while I can
automate the updating of rates using your published rate sheet!
The United States is a country too -- stop thinking about all the other
countries separately from your A-Z rate sheet and leaving out the US
because it is, for you, not International. You can't know what your
customer thinks is International!
So do me a favor -- figure out how to publish your rates on a per-customer
basis, so we can automatically update rates from your site, and so that we
can maybe even automatically send you more traffic when you put a
destination on sale!
Beckman
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Beckman Internet Guy
beckman@angryox.comhttp://www.angryox.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
--Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com--
Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2009 12:05 am Post subject: [asterisk-biz] Dear Termination Providers,
On Fri, 24 Apr 2009, John Todd wrote:
Quote:
You're doing your domain name proud! ;-)
:-)
Quote:
It is almost always contradictory to provider's best interests to
make their rate sheets easy to import or understand. Here's a
document set that I wrote a while back in the hopes that I could beat
providers up into giving me the correct rate table data in a format I
could use:
Nice. You might also want to consider including a connection fee in
there, as some providers will charge 0.001/minute after a 0.50 connection
fee per call. I guess that could be done as
1256,Alabama,0.50,1,0.001,60
Though one second calls might be charged 0.501 whereas in this definition
it would be assumed that 1 second calls were 0.50, and 2-61 second calls
were 0.501.
It's close to an RFP!
Beckman
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Beckman Internet Guy
beckman@angryox.comhttp://www.angryox.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
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Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2009 12:23 am Post subject: [asterisk-biz] Dear Termination Providers,
On Fri, 2009-04-24 at 21:01 -0400, Peter Beckman wrote:
Quote:
Nice. You might also want to consider including a connection fee in
there, as some providers will charge 0.001/minute after a 0.50 connection
fee per call. I guess that could be done as
1256,Alabama,0.50,1,0.001,60
Though one second calls might be charged 0.501 whereas in this definition
it would be assumed that 1 second calls were 0.50, and 2-61 second calls
were 0.501.
It's close to an RFP!
I have not read the document in question, but this is the internet so
that does not disqualify comments :)
I agree that there should be a field for a connection cost, as well as a
standardized time format for when peak/off peak is if that is to be
used. Think globally, so perhaps doing everything UTC would be nice, of
course holidays can be a problem since those are highly regional, and
more thought on this should be considered.
There is also the issue of when does the rate get set? Many pstn
carriers charge based on when the call is made, some do it minute by
minute but that seems more rare at least in north america, some do it at
the end of the call, but you could define a flag that indicates which
way it is as there are only a limited number of ways you can bill when
the rate changes based on time.
Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2009 12:31 am Post subject: [asterisk-biz] Dear Termination Providers,
On Fri, 24 Apr 2009, Trixter aka Bret McDanel wrote:
Quote:
But then I am weird that way.
I don't think you are weird for that opinion, I think you're weird for
other reasons. :-) Even with all those call metrics people throw around
(ACD, some other TLAs that I have to look up), it's hard to really get a
good idea of how good or bad a termination provider (and their
relationship with other carriers) is.
I still wish everyone would publish an easy to parse rate sheet.
Please include US and Canada 1nxx in your rate sheet so I know I can send
US and Canada traffic to you and what you charge differently depending on
the destination (i.e. don't publish "1,0.01" because I know you aren't
letting me send calls to Dominican Republic for that). And why the hell
can't people publish their Hawaii and Alaska rates? I sometimes have to
call and ask, even when they have a whole beautiful A-Z rate list
published on a regular basis. They should really call it "A-Z except
countries we don't consider International." Just show me the rates for
everything!!!
Hurrah! They include USA! But they do it lazy -- US Proper,1,0.013
I'm betting 1808 and 1907 (Alaska and Hawaii) are more expensive...
I dislike the lazyness of the prefix '1'. What's USA Proper
anyway? US48? So what's the rate outside the US48? Hawaii?
Alaska? Maybe they don't serve them? But that prefix '1' says
they do! SO WTF!
OH so close! They do something weird though, some sort of standard
vs premium rates, plus only guarantees 90% of calls via premium
routs will deliver CallerID. Really? What kind of industry is
this?!? At least they enumerate the full prefix for all area codes
in the US. No question that the rate for Jersey and the rate for
Alaska or the US Virgin Islands are different!
So there's a sampling of the ugliness that is the termination market. No
standard CSV formats, no standardized inclusion of rates not considered
international. How do we get by?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Beckman Internet Guy
beckman@angryox.comhttp://www.angryox.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
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Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2009 3:02 am Post subject: [asterisk-biz] Dear Termination Providers,
I think you maybe shocked to see what a full rate deck actually looks
like. A complete deck (if it is competitive) can be upwards of 300,000
lines. If you have a termination provider that is selling US 48 at a
flat rate with no restrictions they either aren't doing it to every
market, or it is way over priced. (If anyone out there wants to
terminate the US 48 with no restrictions for $0.01/min I have a little
over 1,000,000 per day to send you)
What really gets me is all the different ways that international is
done, and the fact that most sheets give you names instead of dialing
codes. Names are next to useless when trying to rate a call and every
carrier has a different name for each dialing code compared to the
next carrier out there. In short being competitive with your rates,
and billing calls isn't not trivial which is why some billing software
alone runs upwards of $100,000.
None of these are great reasons for not publishing a deck, but the
average person buying termination doesn't want to bother with a
300,000 line long rate deck.
Cheers,
Miles
On Apr 24, 2009, at 2:06 PM, Peter Beckman wrote:
Quote:
For the love of god and all that is holy, why do you not include
your US
rates in your ratesheets? I don't care that each customer gets a
different
rate, if you can terminate calls worth your salt, you can hire
someone to
write a script that includes the rate for the customer in your rate
sheets.
It's fine if one has to get the rate sheet via a URL like this:
(Bonus -- If I'm logged into your site, username/password isn't
required!)
I don't mind! I don't even mind if I have to sign up for free to
GET your
A-Z rates! I _DO_ mind having to update US rates by hand while I can
automate the updating of rates using your published rate sheet!
The United States is a country too -- stop thinking about all the
other
countries separately from your A-Z rate sheet and leaving out the US
because it is, for you, not International. You can't know what your
customer thinks is International!
So do me a favor -- figure out how to publish your rates on a per-
customer
basis, so we can automatically update rates from your site, and so
that we
can maybe even automatically send you more traffic when you put a
destination on sale!
Beckman
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Beckman
Internet Guy
beckman@angryox.comhttp://www.angryox.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
--Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com--
Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2009 4:24 am Post subject: [asterisk-biz] Dear Termination Providers,
On Apr 24, 2009, at 2:56 PM, Trixter aka Bret McDanel wrote:
Quote:
On Fri, 2009-04-24 at 14:35 -0700, John Todd wrote:
> It is almost always contradictory to provider's best interests to
> make their rate sheets easy to import or understand. Here's a
> document set that I wrote a while back in the hopes that I could beat
> providers up into giving me the correct rate table data in a format I
> could use:
>
> http://www.loligo.com/asterisk/misc/rates/
I dunno, if people are providing a good service at a fair price, then
its in the providers interest to make it easier, not harder, for more
people to get that info and thus use that provider. The higher the
hurdles are for a customer to work with the provider, the fewer total
customers that provider is going to have.
I for example will not sign an NDA to get a rate list, so any provider
that asks for one is immediately ruled out - and I am not the only
one.
Even if the service is more expensive, if the quality, support, etc is
there, people will pay the higher price. Perhaps not everyone, but
that
gives providers the opportunity to have a tiered or multi-branded
setup.
For example a wholesale backend with 2 or more front ends, one with a
higher price, with only quality routes, functioning caller id, and a
support team that can be contacted quickly and easily, and another
that
is only for people that look at price and care little about any of
the
other stuff. They can even look like they are competing with
themselves, and let the consumer decide what level of service they
want
and get more customers.
I agree, yes, that in theory competitive carriers would give you the
prices up front.
But I've not met any of the big ones that will do that, or even the
medium ones.
L3, XO, GLBX, Sprint, Verizon... nope. You need to sign an NDA for
rates. Each of them has a significantly different format for handing
out rate sheets, sometimes requiring referential lookups in up to four
tables to get a price. (If you've had contradictory experiences, I'd
encourage you to post a URL containing those price lists so that
everyone here can see them - after all, it's not under an NDA,
right? ;-)
And then, as mentioned elsewhere, each has their own concept of tiers
(3 tiers? 5 tiers? 7 tiers? 9 tiers?). But not NPA-XXX-X... rates.
You have to do that on your own. Oh... and by the way... many of them
have different interpretations of those OCN decks. And they won't
tell you what theirs are. It's a guessing game.
Why is this? My belief (which is based on painful experience) is that
they will always overcharge by 3%-15% because of data slop, and they
will make it as difficult as possible for you to argue the cost
delta. It's a way of bleeding the clueless. If you're smart, you'll
know how to catch them at this game. If you're a sloppy carrier who
doesn't care or thinks that it doesn't matter, they'll double their
profit on you.
Anyway: as for my document above - anyone who wants to make comments,
or update it with something like connection fees, just send me a .doc
version back via email with your updates visible in a "track changes"
mode, and I'll update the primary document and give it a new revision
number, if your changes make sense and don't overburden the format.
The transport format perhaps should really be XML, but that may be too
much for the Excel jockeys that typically make these tables for each
carrier, so I kept it as CSV to Keep It Simple.
PS: Why don't more carriers use OSP? (http://www.transnexus.com/) -
TransNexus even was kind enough to contribute a module that's part of
Asterisk as a default! It solves SO many problems.
JT
---
John Todd email:jtodd@digium.com
Digium, Inc. | Asterisk Open Source Community Director
445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville AL 35806 - USA
direct: +1-256-428-6083 http://www.digium.com/
_______________________________________________
--Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com--
Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2009 4:36 am Post subject: [asterisk-biz] Dear Termination Providers,
John Todd wrote:
Quote:
PS: Why don't more carriers use OSP? (http://www.transnexus.com/) -
TransNexus even was kind enough to contribute a module that's part of
Asterisk as a default! It solves SO many problems.
OSP provides good secure bilateral peering infrastructure, not
fundamental changes to the settlement or rating model.
--
Alex Balashov
Evariste Systems
Web : http://www.evaristesys.com/
Tel : (+1) (678) 954-0670
Direct : (+1) (678) 954-0671
Mobile : (+1) (678) 237-1775
_______________________________________________
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Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2009 5:27 am Post subject: [asterisk-biz] Dear Termination Providers,
On Apr 24, 2009, at 10:35 PM, Alex Balashov wrote:
Quote:
John Todd wrote:
> PS: Why don't more carriers use OSP? (http://www.transnexus.com/) -
> TransNexus even was kind enough to contribute a module that's part of
> Asterisk as a default! It solves SO many problems.
OSP provides good secure bilateral peering infrastructure, not
fundamental changes to the settlement or rating model.
You're right - I had mis-remembered cost transport as part of another
protocol I was involved in discussing from a while back as an
extension to TRIP. (Not that TRIP went anywhere.)
Though it does seem to be a reasonable data set to carry...
JT
---
John Todd email:jtodd@digium.com
Digium, Inc. | Asterisk Open Source Community Director
445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville AL 35806 - USA
direct: +1-256-428-6083 http://www.digium.com/
_______________________________________________
--Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com--
Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2009 3:01 pm Post subject: [asterisk-biz] Dear Termination Providers,
Maybe because its bugged, we tested that 2 years ago and there was some
translation bugs,
Maybe its fixed, and maybe they lowered the pricing..
Not everyone has 10-40-100k to put on software that might or not work or be
compatible.
-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-biz-bounces@lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-biz-bounces@lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Alex Balashov
Sent: April-25-09 1:35 AM
To: Commercial and Business-Oriented Asterisk Discussion
Subject: Re: [asterisk-biz] Dear Termination Providers,
John Todd wrote:
Quote:
PS: Why don't more carriers use OSP? (http://www.transnexus.com/) -
TransNexus even was kind enough to contribute a module that's part of
Asterisk as a default! It solves SO many problems.
OSP provides good secure bilateral peering infrastructure, not
fundamental changes to the settlement or rating model.
--
Alex Balashov
Evariste Systems
Web : http://www.evaristesys.com/
Tel : (+1) (678) 954-0670
Direct : (+1) (678) 954-0671
Mobile : (+1) (678) 237-1775
_______________________________________________
--Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com--
Posted: Sun Apr 26, 2009 5:36 pm Post subject: [asterisk-biz] Dear Termination Providers,
Quote:
> John Todd wrote:
>
>> PS: Why don't more carriers use OSP? (http://www.transnexus.com/)
>> TransNexus even was kind enough to contribute a module that's part
>> of Asterisk as a default! It solves SO many problems.
>
> Alex Balashov wrote:
>
> OSP provides good secure bilateral peering infrastructure, not
> fundamental changes to the settlement or rating model.
John Todd wrote:
You're right - I had mis-remembered cost transport as part of another
protocol I was involved in discussing from a while back as an
extension to TRIP. (Not that TRIP went anywhere.)
[JD wrote:] The ETSI OSP standard defines Pricing Indication messages which
enables a VoIP device to query a carrier for their price for a particular
service or dial code. A response to a route query can also include price
information and the price for a call can also be included in the standard
OSP CDR. This OSP Pricing Indication feature is not supported in the
Asterisk OSP module, but is a feature TransNexus can contribute to Asterisk
if there is any community interest.
_______________________________________________
--Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com--
On Fri, 2009-04-24 at 22:20 -0700, John Todd wrote:
Quote:
Why is this? My belief (which is based on painful experience) is that
they will always overcharge by 3%-15% because of data slop, and they
will make it as difficult as possible for you to argue the cost
delta. It's a way of bleeding the clueless. If you're smart, you'll
know how to catch them at this game. If you're a sloppy carrier who
doesn't care or thinks that it doesn't matter, they'll double their
profit on you.
I couldn't agree more. I once had the opportunity (in a previous job)
to turn up accounts with several different long-distance providers, run
several hundred thousand calls through each one, and then compare their
advertised rates to the bill that came at the end of the month.
We had seven providers that passed our initial screen process and went
on to real-world testing. Of those, only *one* actually billed what
they said they would. (And, even more surprising... they were the most
communicative and by far the best to work with.) Three of the seven
providers over-billed us by more than 25%!
The most common issue I found with overbilling was carriers were
claiming to do six-second or one-second increment billing, but actually
charging for full minutes. Other common issues included charging for
uncompleted calls, claiming a flat rate but charging a blended rate, or
charging completely different rates than their rate table specified.
I hate to admit it, but I'm now a firm believer that most carriers in
the business of selling minutes are purposefully deceptive, or at a
minimum almost completely incompetent. I'm also a firm believer that
they feel justified in doing so because their customers rarely challenge
them on it. (It's human nature to want to avoid auditing the phone
bill... When is the last time you did this?)
In short -- you've got the tools to be able to audit your carrier and
see how well they're living up to their promised rates. Do your
homework, and you might save more money than you realize.
--
Jared Smith
Training Manager
Digium, Inc.
_______________________________________________
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