[asterisk-biz] Dear Termination Providers,

[Bill Michaelson]

I didn't infer that he wants to evaluate based solely on price.  If it 
were me, I would want that same information in order to simply put the 
price issue to bed such that I could evaluate other factors with less 
obfuscation of the total package.  Plus, I regard the easy access to 
pricing data as a quality issue that reflects on the package and service 
as a whole.

By the same token, I am always suspicious of vendors that obscure their 
prices behind a veil of quality claims.


Stephen Davies wrote:
>
>
> 2009/5/1 Peter Beckman <beckman at angryox.com <mailto:beckman at angryox.com>>
>
>     Alexander Harrowell wrote:
>
>         What's needed is a rate deck that includes every route the
>         provider
>
>     supports, US, Canada and everything else.
>
>
>
> Hi,
>
> You seem to want to evaluate termination providers on nothing else 
> except price.  I'm not sure why encouraging that simplistic rule is in 
> the interests of termination providers, or your own, for that matter.
>
> What about minor details like quality, CLI support, whether the 
> terminating lines are legitimate or stolen from innocent third parties 
> - don't they matter?
>
> Some unscrupulous scenarios for terminators to use if lots of 
> originators have all these rate decks in their routing engines and are 
> routing solely by price:
>
> 1) Publish a low rate to a destination.  "Connect" calls in excess of 
> your capacity (so you can bill them), but connect them to nowhere. 
> Once originators notice apologise profusely for the technical problem 
> but keep the money (the originator won't be able to say exactly which 
> calls failed in this manner).  Fail 10% of calls like this and you can 
> make up what your published low rate is costing you, and the 
> originator probably will accept the CSR that they get.
>
> 2) Publish a low rate but run your clock a bit fast to make up the 
> difference.  Remember that you only need to be 0.000001c/min cheapest 
> in order to get lots and lots of minutes because people are selecting 
> automatically by price.  
>
> 3) "Forget" to mention various billing wrinkles.  Your excuse is that 
> the csv format doesn't provide for the flag-fall charge, or the call 
> attempt charge if your calls' CSR falls below a threshold, or what 
> have you.  Make sure the info is published somewhere even though you 
> "can't" put them in the csv.
>
> Can others think of more (this is quite fun >:) )
>
> So surely you need to know more about your termination partner than 
> just their price?  And do you really want to tell your termination 
> providers that all you care about is price.  Some cheaply terminated 
> calls already sound pretty terrible.  Do we really want to encourage 
> this race to rock bottom?
>
> Steve
>
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