[Asterisk-biz] Double standards with netfone.ca.

[alex at pilosoft.com]

On Mon, 6 Jun 2005, Michael Giagnocavo wrote:

> >People who use asterisk have an ability to do far more traffic *because
> >you can be multiplexing lots of customers' traffic* than just one
> >customer with a phone handset.
> >
> >-alex
> 
> Um, and your point is? Their Terms of Service should handle that. If you
> sign up for "unlimited" at $13 and then use 10K minutes, they need to
> figure that out. Just because you "might" go over the X amount of
> "unlimited" minutes is silly.
The terms of service *say that*. Got asterisk? No unlimited for you. 
Broadvoice does that. There are very few companies that *don't* do that - 
and they are setting themselves up for abuse by dishonest users.

> So, yes, charging more 'cause you use Asterisk is stupid. They should
> charge more for overuse, support, etc. They should not charge based on
> the UserAgent. That's like software vendors that charge more cause you
> are running a "server" OS.
But you can't charge for 'overuse' or 'support' when your main business
model is to provide 'unlimited residential service'. You have two classes 
of users: ones that fit your business model (grandma with an ATA) and ones 
that don't (asterisk noob). It is perfectly fine to discriminate against 
ones that are far more likely to abuse your service.

-alex