[asterisk-biz] European mobile tariffs & US tariffs

[Trixter aka Bret McDanel]

On Sun, 2008-09-21 at 23:27 -0500, Karl Fife wrote:
> Does anyone know (roughly) how much wireless carriers in Europe get paid
> by the terminating carrier? 

a lot.  Often its many cents per minute, I dont know *exactly* and that
is likely to vary from carrier to carrier and country to country, but
there is a reason its often 15-20 cents per minute ...  


>  I know there's a term for this tariff, but
> it escapes me.  I know I pay roughly ten times as much to terminate on a
> mobile than a terrestrial line.  I assume it's quite high.  Is anyone in
> the business who can chime in with some approximate numbers?
> 

that is why some people have setup a mobile number for dial around
stuff, and made a fortune off it.  Some landline carriers have even done
this, and when caught the service went away because they werent mobile
certified.  

There are however carriers in europe that are starting to realize that
its insane to keep the fees high and are trying to get them lowered, as
a result you are seeing slightly better rates in some areas and some are
starting to give more free minutes and such (or priced as if they are on
the same network), although that is taking a really long time to happen
and its very slow.  


> For that matter does anyone know how much US carriers get paid in large
> metropolitan areas like Boston or Chicago?  I'm also interested in these
> 'rural' telcos like those (presumably) behind freedigits and IPKall et
> al., allowing them to offer free DID's to anyone. 
> 

that depends, in the US there are many different things, the
interconnection agreements will spell it out, but often local is a very
small fraction of a penny, interstate is anywhere from 0.007 (FCC cap
with rural *I*lecs exempted from that cap more often than not - clecs
are not generally exempted because they can cherry pick the locations
they serve, ilecs cant) the sweet spot is generally intrastate interlata
which often is 3-4 cents a minute.

There is a move by some carriers to goto a bill and keep method in the
US, basically what this means is that you bill your customers I bill
mine and we do not pay each other for traffic we push.  This sometimes
has a rider that traffic has to be symmetric and if its not then it
changes, usually with 30 days notice, although like SBC they generally
prefer to be the only ones that can invoke that 30 day notice - which
isnt fair and you can argue to get the contract written differently, but
that is their default.

-- 
Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com     Bret McDanel
Belfast +44 28 9099 6461        US +1 516 687 5200
http://www.trxtel.com the phone company that pays you!