[asterisk-biz] NPA/NXX Termination Breakout Rates

[SIP]

Peter Beckman wrote:
> A few months (maybe a year) ago someone posted a fairly aggressive US
> Termination pricing broken out by NPA/NXX.  I'm interested to see what the
> current rates are these days if I break out my calls by NPA/NXX.  I don't
> have that many minutes (100k) per month, but I'm always interested in seeing
> what's out there.
>
> Also, who offers free Toll-Free termination?
>
> For those looking for great US/Canada termination, I should mention that
> VoIPInvite rocks.  I use them currently for all my termination, and they
> are awesome.
>
> I'm looking for 2 reasons --
>      1. I want to have a backup provider for disaster planning
>      2. I want to see if I can reduce costs for the current number of calls
>         I'm handling now.  I haven't asked Vijay for an NPA/NXX deck yet, so
>         Vijay, I'll email you separately. :-)
>
> PS -- What happend to Brian Fertig and Molten Telecom?  Their website went
> down in February... I think that's who I was working with when I was
> considering termination providers.
>
>   

Brian left Molten shortly before they imploded, I believe. I'm guessing 
(pure speculation based on hearsay, rumour, and wild supposition) that 
they cut all staff because they didn't have the money to keep them. And 
shortly thereafter, cut their losses and closed.

We looked at VoIPInvite, but couldn't get things to work with their 
systems. We support reinvites to keep minimum paths between callers that 
can use them, but as soon as the reinvite came through, their hardware 
cut us off. They had pretty good rates, though.

We've had excellent luck with Vitelity for US/Canada/A-Z termination 
quality, but after signing their contracts, they seem to have slipped 
something in that wasn't in their contract anywhere (which we're still 
deciding whether or not to fight). They charge for international calls 
(by that, they mean anything not US/Canada, which means the majority of 
OUR calls as most of our users are not from US/Canada) based on when a 
call is initiated as opposed to when it connects. Meaning, if the call 
takes four rings to answer, that's another 20 seconds or so of billing. 
If it takes a LONG time to answer, it could be an extra minute just 
because the call took time to connect. Utterly non-standard, and against 
their contract, but that's what they say they're 'required to do' from 
their underlying carrier. If you bill with a minimum of 1 minute billing 
(as we do), then it makes little difference in the long run. If you're 
billing 6-second, it can make a huge offset in your billing.

We had RNK Telecom for a while. Excellent rates. But their deck rates 
change weekly (sometimes DRASTICALLY), and are sent out in excel 
spreadsheet files, making the whole thing time consuming and difficult 
to automate. Their quality is also somewhat sub-par, and there were 
NUMEROUS occasions when a number or entire region would be unreachable, 
and after days and days of calling and trying to get a response, we'd be 
told a rather terse, "Sorry. There's a problem, but we can't fix it. 
Choose someone else for that route." This happened with some US/Canada 
numbers, and entire countries like Norway and Italy. While their rates 
were very competitive, for those reasons, I would most certainly not 
recommend them.

Jay Kordic, who lurks around here, represents several carriers with 
excellent rates. Excel is one of them with fantastic A-Z and US/Canada 
termination and I vaguely remember they had very competitive rates and a 
nicely distributed network.

PointOne does fantastic quality for US/Canada termination, but their A-Z 
rates are pretty high.

There are the usual other players like Teliax, Bandwidth.com, etc. No 
experience with them directly, but I hear raves aplenty about them. Not 
sure about their deck rates, though.

Most of these players (if not all) offer Toll-free termination. Of 
course, it's not toll-free. But that's the game. ;)

N.