[asterisk-biz] calling card business
Alex Balashov
abalashov at evaristesys.com
Mon Sep 21 07:12:30 CDT 2009
The retail side of the calling card and - depending on what you're
doing, fixed-line international long distance - business is a very
sociological kind of art.
There are plenty of highly targeted, niche opportunities. The most
common one in the US is first-generation immigrants, who are
psychologically very accustomed to pay-as-you-go services, refilling
various balances (often in person), and phone cards. Some of these
people don't have computers and/or Internet access, while others are
deeply suspicious of online credit card payments and/or see Skype or
other VoIP as some sort of flaky avant garde adventurism for only the
most experimentally-minded. These people - or their parents - can often
be reached somewhat reliably via formal and informal networks of ethnic
food stores, convenience stores serving a particular demographic area or
having a prevailing ethno-national ownership structure, etc. Church
and/or religious groups are probably another key marketing channel,
depending on one's views on the morality of commandeering such a forum
in the service of transacting commerce.
These niche populations are unlikely to go away, structurally, in the
near future. It's not so much an issue of technological penetration in
the Anglo-American and Eurocentric world as personal attitudes, habits
of mind, customs, and so on. Many people from the target demographics
come from countries where the most important constraint is not even
necessarily infrastructure, but rather the regulatory and legal
environment in which telephony happens, e.g. tightly controlled
quasi-governmental incumbents with state-sanctioned monopolies on plant
and access.
So, I think the operative skill set in marketing phone cards is really
one that massages the offering and the presentation to fit the
idiosyncrasies of people--to a greater extent than can be said of
marketing in general.
The key challenge from an economic perspective is, naturally, scale, as
with anything that doesn't have mass-market potential. If you
specialise in termination to Latin America and get in with food and
convenience stores in south and east Texas, there's just a very hard
addressable market limit there, and that's the bottom line. That tends
toward higher per-unit pricing, while the commoditisation and
ultra-competitiveness of international long-distance produces a downward
pressure.
My personal observations suggest that this is a highly commoditised and
supersaturated market in the US, and I wouldn't bother getting into the
calling card business for either termination to the US from other
countries, or to them from the US. I can't speak to other countries,
but suspect that there may, as has been suggested in the thread, some
very lucrative and viable "pairs."
Nir Simionovich wrote:
> I guess that in some retrospective. the traditional calling card
> business is dead - however, new services such as PokeTalk.Com, 012Global
> and others introduce a new spin to this highly traditional market.
>
> The introduction of Dual and Tripe IMSI SIM cards had spun a totally new
> breed of calling card, a SIM bound one - one that no longer requires the
> printing of cards, but is now bound to an electronic element.
>
> In some form, I guess the business will never really die - it will
> simply morph into a new one.
>
> My company caters to 6 different calling card operators, each one doing
> its own thing. We've developed a highly versatile and robust
> calling-card/prepaid/postpaid/IVR development framework, which our
> customers utilize to build these systems using Asterisk. Some of these
> are racking up to 800 concurrent calls at any given time of the day -
> which means, around 35 million minutes a month catered using Asterisk.
>
> Nir S
>
>
> On Sun, Sep 20, 2009 at 10:17 PM, Dan Miller <dan.miller at gmail.com
> <mailto:dan.miller at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> I haven't sized the market lately and was primarily North American
> focused when I did.
>
> It appears that there are lively country pairs for calls originating
> from urban areas in the U.S. (to Latin America, South America,
> Carribean, Middle East)
>
> Can't speak to call volumes because we haven't systematically
> gathered info lately.
>
> There will always be a baseline of voice traffic over public
> networks, but it does seem like Skype, Trufone.... other softphone
> based approaches would choke off more expensive alternatives once
> people get low price (of shared), connected PCs.
>
> Dan
>
>
> On Sun, Sep 20, 2009 at 7:23 AM, Alex Balashov
> <abalashov at evaristesys.com <mailto:abalashov at evaristesys.com>> wrote:
>
> IP is compelling for access, but the carrier world is still
> firmly TDM.
> That, and IP just isn't as reliable at this point.
>
> When someone offers a cheap TDM switch, I get intrigued.
>
> David Knell wrote:
>
> > It's not dead; it's merely changed.
> >
> > Last time I bought a TDM switch, I paid about US$150,000 for
> 64E1s - so
> > it'd switch about 1000 calls. Several years later, we run
> that traffic
> > volume and more through two commodity Dell servers which, with
> > bandwidth, cost us about $250/month. And it takes a few
> hours to hook
> > up to a new carrier, rather than weeks or months in the TDM
> world. So
> > it's no wonder that there's a lot of TDM equipment coming
> onto the
> > market; IP is too compelling.
> >
> > There is also a lot of activity around cellphones - for
> example, a
> > couple of the UK calling card companies have launched MVNOs
> with an
> > emphasis on cheap international calling (such as Lycatel with
> > Lycamobile), selling SIMs through their existing
> distribution, and
> > existing carriers are starting to offer cheap international
> calling
> > packages, both to postpaid and prepaid customers.
> >
> > Question back at you - what do you say when someone asks if
> you can sell
> > their TDM switch?
> >
> > --Dave
> >
> >> is it dead? i have many people e-mailing me asking if I can
> sell their
> >> switches (NACT, DTI, Excel) I also know from last year the
> intelecard
> >> show was a bust...so what do you guys think? are we all just
> heading
> >> to mobile phones and unified communications? what about the
> people
> >> that have credit issues? prepaid cell phones?
> >>
> >> --
> >> Thank you,
> >>
> >> -Wes-
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>
> --
> Alex Balashov - Principal
> Evariste Systems
> Web : http://www.evaristesys.com/
> Tel : (+1) (678) 954-0670
> Direct : (+1) (678) 954-0671
>
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--
Alex Balashov - Principal
Evariste Systems
Web : http://www.evaristesys.com/
Tel : (+1) (678) 954-0670
Direct : (+1) (678) 954-0671
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