[asterisk-biz] Dear Termination Providers,

[Peter Beckman]

On Fri, 24 Apr 2009, Trixter aka Bret McDanel wrote:

> But then I am weird that way.

  I don't think you are weird for that opinion, I think you're weird for
  other reasons. :-)  Even with all those call metrics people throw around
  (ACD, some other TLAs that I have to look up), it's hard to really get a
  good idea of how good or bad a termination provider (and their
  relationship with other carriers) is.

  I still wish everyone would publish an easy to parse rate sheet.

  Please include US and Canada 1nxx in your rate sheet so I know I can send
  US and Canada traffic to you and what you charge differently depending on
  the destination (i.e. don't publish "1,0.01" because I know you aren't
  letting me send calls to Dominican Republic for that).  And why the hell
  can't people publish their Hawaii and Alaska rates?  I sometimes have to
  call and ask, even when they have a whole beautiful A-Z rate list
  published on a regular basis.  They should really call it "A-Z except
  countries we don't consider International."  Just show me the rates for
  everything!!!

  Let me call out some providers:

     Vitelity: http://www.vitelity.com/intlcsv.php

         No mention of anything except US Virgin Islands,1340,0.01664
         No Canada, no Hawaii or Alaska

     Teliax: http://media.teliax.com/rates.csv

         No US, they do mention Canada rates though

     Binfone: http://www.binfone.com/a-to-z-rates.csv

         Mention Alaska and Hawaii, but not the rest of the US.  And they
         include Canada.  Winners!  But still losers.

     Voipjet: http://www.voipjet.com/ratescsv.php

         Hurrah!  They include USA!  But they do it lazy -- US Proper,1,0.013
         I'm betting 1808 and 1907 (Alaska and Hawaii) are more expensive...
         I dislike the lazyness of the prefix '1'.  What's USA Proper
         anyway?  US48?  So what's the rate outside the US48?  Hawaii?
         Alaska?  Maybe they don't serve them?  But that prefix '1' says
         they do!  SO WTF!

     GRNvoip: http://70.42.75.67/grnvoip/dlnRate.asp

         OH so close!  They do something weird though, some sort of standard
         vs premium rates, plus only guarantees 90% of calls via premium
         routs will deliver CallerID.  Really?  What kind of industry is
         this?!?  At least they enumerate the full prefix for all area codes
         in the US.  No question that the rate for Jersey and the rate for
         Alaska or the US Virgin Islands are different!

  So there's a sampling of the ugliness that is the termination market.  No
  standard CSV formats, no standardized inclusion of rates not considered
  international.  How do we get by?
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Peter Beckman                                                  Internet Guy
beckman at angryox.com                                 http://www.angryox.com/
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