[asterisk-biz] Experimental/new VoIP rate search engine.

[Trixter aka Bret McDanel]

On Sun, 2009-01-04 at 18:09 -0500, Kristian Kielhofner wrote:
> On 1/4/09, Alex Balashov <abalashov at evaristesys.com> wrote:
> > I think if this gets traction you will see a lot of providers doing
> >  ultra-low bait-and-switch rates. Most cannot afford to be in a price
> >  race to the bottom.
> >
> 
>   Agreed.
> 
>   This current race to the bottom, while somewhat inevitable, is not
> necessarily a good thing for customers.
> 


to a point this is where the ISP market was just over 10 years ago in
the US.  Race to the bottom, then they discovered things like churn rate
costs, and all that.  They started charging set up fees, many providers
went under or were so strapped for cash they sold to the competition
that had the resources to float at/near cost and all that.

When the dust settled there were far fewer providers, and any provider
with fewer than 3000 customers basically was gone.  

So if people price it towards zero expect eventually other fees to come
into play and the smaller players that cant get the volume discounts or
cant interconnect in a cost effective way are going to have financial
problems.

> - Customer support will be non existent (or worthless).  How are you
> paying for it when your markup is %10 or less (whatever it may be)?
> 
or it will be a pay to call service.  Each customer support call will be
like a MSFT customer support call where you pay just to talk to someone
who may or may not be able to help you.  See the above about "other
fees" :)

This can be a good thing for customers that do not need support, they
can get a lower cost per month, and the business still remains
profitable that is providing the service.


>   I don't mean to be such a pessimist but I can't help but speak my
> mind, especially in the current economic climate.

I dont think that you are being that pessimistic, its not the first time
that a similar industry went through something similar and the results
can be observed to try to guess somewhat intelligently as to how they
may pan out this time.  Of course each region of the world has different
rules on what can and cant be done and at what costs.  So what may be
cost effective in one place may be a huge money sink in another.  

And even though I removed your "back on topic" comment I dont think that
you were off topic with raising all of this, rather you touched on
something that should be considered.

For example "total cost" includes:
minimum monthly usage fees
start up/tear down costs
term requirements (contracts)
support (available, free, per incident, costs ...)
geographic region can be helpful - recall in the last couple years where
fiber went, off asia, through the med just recently, etc - knowing where
you are sending calls to is not just about jitter/loss but also how
vulnerable is it to going out for all calls.

Why an automated lookup of the proxy IP and how well connected that is,
and if possible the media gateways they send to if in a different
network would be good, the AS number and all that could be searched to
see if its on a single homed network or multihomed etc.  In essence when
you select a voip provider you are making a tacit decision on their
upstream, and as we all know sometimes marketing on how well connected
someone is does not always match the factual stuff, so autoprobing this
can be handy :)

and so on.  There are a lot of other costs that have to be included in
any "rate comparison" system.  So I think you touched on something that
will require a lot more thought to properly implement, and how can one
search on what fields (what is important to one person may not be
important to others).


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

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