[asterisk-biz] Unlimited DID

[Trixter aka Bret McDanel]

On Thu, 2008-08-14 at 09:47 -0700, Jai Rangi wrote:
> All,
> 
> I want to take community opinion on this. 
> Would there be enough interest if I can offer Unlimited channels, non
> metered DID at $8-$11 (Depending on the volume commitment) per month.
> Target is to sell atleast 10000 DIDs in one to 2 months of time
> frame.  
> 
> Any comment would be appreciated. 
> 
> Thank you,
> -Jai
> 

I think people would like it, but there would be some apprehension about
it.  The pstn carrier has a finite amount of channels available for that
exchange.  You only have so much bandwidth, even if you never touched
the media the provider only has so much bandwidth.  Then there is the
CDR processing, route processing, etc - cpu resources are finite,
although you can add more just like you can add more pstn and inet
capacity.

So would $8-11 cover all of those costs and allow you to really do
unlimited service?  What if someone ran some application that generated
hundreds of thousands of calls?  Or even a few that just did hundreds?  

Granted if you did 10k DIDs at $8 that is $80k/mo.  And lets say that
10% did above average traffic of say 150 average channels, that is still
15,000 channels that would have to be maintained give or take (I really
am just pulling numbers out of thin air).  You would certainly be able
to afford the cpu and bandwidth costs, which will require more than
1Gbps (I always discount bandwidth both because of atm padding and
because you never want it 100%), but the carrier may not be able to
handle that channel load, and some of the call centers I have seen
traffic on, 150 channels is low, some do thousands at a time, which
would skew that slightly (even though its an average over the top 10%
users).  

In general from what I have seen, most "unlimited" plans have some type
of limit burried somewhere in their user agreement/tos, this is because
capacity is finite and they do not want to go overboard with capacity
and lose money.  On a slight tangent, I just wish that carriers who
didnt offer real unlimited would stop advertising it as such, * or not
to indicate some obscure definition of "unlimited"...

> 
-- 
Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com     Bret McDanel
Belfast +44 28 9099 6461        US +1 516 687 5200
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