[Asterisk-Users] DID VoIP trunk provider for metro Chicago, LA and/or Orlando.

[Carmi Weinzweig]

Chris -
	In the real telephony world, one can buy a DID trunk without buying a 
PRI. If one wants more than about 10 trunks (depending on provider), it 
may be cheaper to buy a PRI instead of individual trunks.

Having said that, most of these VoIP providers have their pricing model 
exactly backwards (they seem to only want to compete with Centrex, not 
with regular PBX services), in that they charge a lot for resources 
that are freely available and cost them little (phone numbers), but 
very little for scarce resources (call terminations) that cost them 
much more.

As an example, they purchase a PRI from either an ILEC or a CLEC for 
between $100 and $1000 (depending on distance and market) giving them 
23 voice channels and as many numbers as they want (again, numbers cost 
them at most between $0.01 and $0.10).

They assign me a phone number (a value of $0.01 and $0.10) and let me 
receive as many simultaneous calls as my bandwidth allows (using these 
numbers every call absorbs a channel that costs between $4.35 and 
$43.48).

What I would like is to be limited as to how much of a scarce resource 
(channels) I can use, but not be limited as to how much of a plentiful 
resource (numbers) I can use.

/carmi



On 20 Jul, 2004, at 14:22, Chris A. Icide wrote:

> On 10:41 AM 7/20/2004, Carmi Weinzweig wrote:
> >I want many phone numbers so that each phone in my facility has its 
> own
> >phone number, but I really do not need that many simultaneous calls 
> and
> >it would be cost prohibitive to pay several dollars for each phone
> >number.
>
> It's a different business plan.  By going to a VoIP provider, you 
> alleviate the requirement for hardwware you lease or own to terminate 
> PRI's at multiple locations and distribute the calls to your end 
> users.  So, you aren't paying for the physical T1 and associated 
> hardware.  The VoIP providers are now incurring that cost and must 
> recuperate it (unless they are operatiing under the '90s dot com 
> business plans in which recuperating costs is not required - but you 
> better be ready to turn up a new provider on a moments notice if you 
> are using one of these).  So in the past if I am understanding you, 
> you would buy a PRI and pay some fee for the T1 itself, as well as 
> $0.01 to $0.10 per number assigned.  In this case, you want to not pay 
> the T1 fee but still pay low per number rates.  Maybe if you talked to 
> the providers they might come to a different pricing plan for you that 
> emulates the old way and gives you a better bang for the number?
>
> -Chris
>
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