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

[Steven Critchfield]

On Tue, 2004-07-20 at 15:58, Carmi Weinzweig wrote:
> 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.

Cost isn't a determination of scarcity. Numbers are scarce in the fact
that they get assigned out to a specific entity and for a time, it is
associated with that single entity.  Phone lines for a VoIP provider
though can be shared amongst the entire customer base. 

A PRI circuit should be between $35 and $50 per channel, Split amongst
3-5 customers. Of course you have to then account for the data side of
the network too. 

Last time we discussed with our telco pricing on DIDs, it was $4/month
per 20 numbers. Anything more than a couple blocks required some
justification. I think it was basically to make sure we wheren't running
some form of scam and moveing from number to number. 

> 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.



-- 
Steven Critchfield <critch at basesys.com>