[asterisk-biz] Free DIDs

[Pascal Bruno]

Hmmmmm, makes sense.

On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 9:11 PM, Trixter aka Bret McDanel <
trixter at 0xdecafbad.com> wrote:

> On Sun, 2009-08-16 at 20:27 -0400, Pascal Bruno wrote:
> > How come MagicJack is still around?
> >
>
> they no longer say unlimited, their TOS says 20  times average usage,
> and per someone on the inside average usage is 104 mninutes.  So
> basically its $2/mo (prepaid up front) for 2000 minutes a month.
>
> In addition to that they do extensive LCR with highly questionable
> routes, they profit off the sale of the adapters.  If you use the
> service for a couple months then walk away they still have your money.
>
> Ymax (parent company) bought out tigerjet or something who makes the
> chip that drives the magicjack adapter (you can use it for skype or
> anything else hte TJ adapters are good for).  They also own a clec and I
> dont know if they are getting compensated for inbound or not, but they
> could be.
>
> When you call "international" they have fairly high rates compared to
> other providers.
>
> I also dont know how much of this is a loss leader to get market share.
> Skype offered free calling for a while.  Google voice now offers free
> calling.  Skype is about $3/mo for 10,000 minutes (they say unlimited
> then in the TOS define unlimited as 10,000 minutes).
>
> I do not know if they are operating under a pyramid type bubble now or
> not, because people pay up front it may be that some of the annual fee
> money is used for this months operating expenses, meaning once the
> growth stops at an ever increasing rate they will collapse.  Then again
> it could be that they are profitable when you get into the totality of
> their revenue streams.  I believe that they place advertisements in the
> dialer, and because they modified the way that the md5 hash is done you
> cant use standard sip software (unless you are clever, figure it out
> which is not hard with IDApro, and write a proxy).  There is a perl
> proxy that exists but it forces all traffic to the same proxy, mine uses
> iptables to pass it to a perl script which does the magic that is
> required and sends it to whatever proxy was configured.  This means that
> you can use standard sip stuff again.  The other perl proxy that
> forwards stuff to the same sip proxy is out there somewhere, it was
> forwarded to me at one time after I did mine so I dont know where it is
> specifically.
>
>
> With all of that said, it is not hard to charge people $2/mo for 100
> minutes, that works out to about 2 cents a minute for the average
> customer which is quite profitable by in large.  Please note that
> magicjack does not sell outbound telephone service (clever contract
> wording).  They sell inbound service only.  The outbound service is free
> and they can take it away at any time as a result.
>
> --
> Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com     Bret McDanel
> pgp key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x8AE5C721
>
>
>
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