[asterisk-biz] Free DIDs

[Trixter aka Bret McDanel]

On Sun, 2009-08-16 at 20:27 -0400, Pascal Bruno wrote:
> How come MagicJack is still around?
> 

they no longer say unlimited, their TOS says 20  times average usage,
and per someone on the inside average usage is 104 mninutes.  So
basically its $2/mo (prepaid up front) for 2000 minutes a month.  

In addition to that they do extensive LCR with highly questionable
routes, they profit off the sale of the adapters.  If you use the
service for a couple months then walk away they still have your money.  

Ymax (parent company) bought out tigerjet or something who makes the
chip that drives the magicjack adapter (you can use it for skype or
anything else hte TJ adapters are good for).  They also own a clec and I
dont know if they are getting compensated for inbound or not, but they
could be.

When you call "international" they have fairly high rates compared to
other providers.

I also dont know how much of this is a loss leader to get market share.
Skype offered free calling for a while.  Google voice now offers free
calling.  Skype is about $3/mo for 10,000 minutes (they say unlimited
then in the TOS define unlimited as 10,000 minutes).  

I do not know if they are operating under a pyramid type bubble now or
not, because people pay up front it may be that some of the annual fee
money is used for this months operating expenses, meaning once the
growth stops at an ever increasing rate they will collapse.  Then again
it could be that they are profitable when you get into the totality of
their revenue streams.  I believe that they place advertisements in the
dialer, and because they modified the way that the md5 hash is done you
cant use standard sip software (unless you are clever, figure it out
which is not hard with IDApro, and write a proxy).  There is a perl
proxy that exists but it forces all traffic to the same proxy, mine uses
iptables to pass it to a perl script which does the magic that is
required and sends it to whatever proxy was configured.  This means that
you can use standard sip stuff again.  The other perl proxy that
forwards stuff to the same sip proxy is out there somewhere, it was
forwarded to me at one time after I did mine so I dont know where it is
specifically.


With all of that said, it is not hard to charge people $2/mo for 100
minutes, that works out to about 2 cents a minute for the average
customer which is quite profitable by in large.  Please note that
magicjack does not sell outbound telephone service (clever contract
wording).  They sell inbound service only.  The outbound service is free
and they can take it away at any time as a result.  

-- 
Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com     Bret McDanel
pgp key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x8AE5C721