[asterisk-biz] Stretching to reach Level3's $25K take-or-pay

[Brian Scott]

Hi,

In the past, this list has debated the finer points of setting up a 
group/cooperative to "pool" minutes to reach a particular carrier's 
minimum, allowing the group to get the benefits of working directly with 
the carrier, and share in the reduced costs. If I recall correctly, this 
never went far since it ends up coming down to finding one company 
willing to take on the financial responsibility (e.g. sign the contract) 
with a large revenue commit.

So we are using about $10K per month and are considering trying to reach 
Level3's $25K take-or-pay so we can work directly with them rather than 
work through a reseller. It's not that I don't like resellers, but I'm 
always disappointed; in my experience they don't typically give access 
to Level3 APIs, ordering is one step slower, and obviously they have 
their markup. In one word, they are not "transparent".

$25K is about 3.5M US termination minutes per month, so I was thinking I 
can take on the $25K commit, if I could find about 30 people who had 
100,000 termination minutes per month. Since I'm not really trying to 
profit from this particular venture [I'm only trying to bump up our 
volumes so we can work directly with Level3], I was thinking I would 
sell the minutes at cost (I don't have exact numbers; Level3 is supposed 
to be sending me pricing; I'm expecting 0.007/min blended or less), and 
we'd have a win-win situation.

We'd try do this switchless, so you'd be passing traffic directly with 
Level3. I'd prefer to do termination, since it's easy, but we could  do 
origination & toll-free origination if the ordering was very low volume.

If this interests you, please contact me off list and if there's enough 
response I'll formulate a detailed plan.

Brian Scott
TierraNet Inc.