[asterisk-biz] Dear Termination Providers,

[Stephen Davies]

2009/5/1 Peter Beckman <beckman at angryox.com>

> Alexander Harrowell wrote:
>
> What's needed is a rate deck that includes every route the provider
>
> supports, US, Canada and everything else.
>


Hi,

You seem to want to evaluate termination providers on nothing else except
price.  I'm not sure why encouraging that simplistic rule is in the
interests of termination providers, or your own, for that matter.

What about minor details like quality, CLI support, whether the terminating
lines are legitimate or stolen from innocent third parties - don't they
matter?

Some unscrupulous scenarios for terminators to use if lots of originators
have all these rate decks in their routing engines and are routing solely by
price:

1) Publish a low rate to a destination.  "Connect" calls in excess of your
capacity (so you can bill them), but connect them to nowhere. Once
originators notice apologise profusely for the technical problem but keep
the money (the originator won't be able to say exactly which calls failed in
this manner).  Fail 10% of calls like this and you can make up what your
published low rate is costing you, and the originator probably will accept
the CSR that they get.

2) Publish a low rate but run your clock a bit fast to make up the
difference.  Remember that you only need to be 0.000001c/min cheapest in
order to get lots and lots of minutes because people are selecting
automatically by price.

3) "Forget" to mention various billing wrinkles.  Your excuse is that the
csv format doesn't provide for the flag-fall charge, or the call attempt
charge if your calls' CSR falls below a threshold, or what have you.  Make
sure the info is published somewhere even though you "can't" put them in the
csv.

Can others think of more (this is quite fun >:) )

So surely you need to know more about your termination partner than just
their price?  And do you really want to tell your termination providers that
all you care about is price.  Some cheaply terminated calls already sound
pretty terrible.  Do we really want to encourage this race to rock bottom?

Steve
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