[asterisk-biz] Dear Termination Providers,

[Wes Reece]

Hope I dont get flammed but here goes...

I like NDA's. It makes business sense. The telecom industry has always been
a close knit of carrier relationships. Those relationship start with an NDA,
as Jon Todd mentioned the big guys wont talk to you unless they get you to
sign an NDA, and if you make a business decision not to bother with those
carriers who have such practices you'll always be dealing the with the
little "me too" carriers. You know the ones that buy routes from every other
reseller out there mark it up and then sell to you. When something doesnt
work good luck trying to get it fixed in a reasonable time frame. They dont
own the routes. The NDA makes sense to me because it lets me know that the
carrier and customer are serious in entering a business relationship,
something worthwhile, not a BS 5% markup on a route that has 15 "carriers"
in the middle but really belongs to AT&T. I'm all for open source, I think
its great for software and problem sovling, but not for the telecom
industry(carriers) on a business level, I dont like it that some companies
openly display their rates. It makes it difficult for me to sell my routes
because I have to compete with "me too" providers that dont actually own
anything and cant guarantee quality, they dont share my overhead. Am I
making sense here? At the end of the day all the minutes in the world are
really terminated on a hand full of carriers (mostly settlement traffic).
VoIP in the early 90's was awesome because thats when people made real
money, the barriers of entry were higher then and competition was
respectable. I feel like I have to sort through so many junk routes and
companies now a days just to satisfy my demanding customers and this always
gives voip a bad name. I remember buying Cisco 5300's for like $45k a pop,
and never ever having a customer even blink about the quality because on the
other VOIP End was a carrier who also shelled out some dough and was serious
about the relationship and made sure calls went thru. What do you guys
think? I'm not trying to hinder innovation or VoIP maturity here, I'm
talking about the business aspect of things. I feel like the carrier market
has gone to sh*t. Ok I'm done ranting and raving. Holla at me if you want
awesome routes at reasonable prices and are willing to sign an NDA ;)

-ONE

On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 5:56 PM, Trixter aka Bret McDanel <
trixter at 0xdecafbad.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 2009-04-24 at 14:35 -0700, John Todd wrote:
> >    It is almost always contradictory to provider's best interests to
> > make their rate sheets easy to import or understand.   Here's a
> > document set that I wrote a while back in the hopes that I could beat
> > providers up into giving me the correct rate table data in a format I
> > could use:
> >
> >    http://www.loligo.com/asterisk/misc/rates/
>
>
> I dunno, if people are providing a good service at a fair price, then
> its in the providers interest to make it easier, not harder, for more
> people to get that info and thus use that provider.  The higher the
> hurdles are for a customer to work with the provider, the fewer total
> customers that provider is going to have.
>
> I for example will not sign an NDA to get a rate list, so any provider
> that asks for one is immediately ruled out - and I am not the only
> one.
>
> Even if the service is more expensive, if the quality, support, etc is
> there, people will pay the higher price.  Perhaps not everyone, but that
> gives providers the opportunity to have a tiered or multi-branded setup.
> For example a wholesale backend with 2 or more front ends, one with a
> higher price, with only quality routes, functioning caller id, and a
> support team that can be contacted quickly and easily, and another that
> is only  for people that look at price and care little about any of the
> other stuff.  They can even look like they are competing with
> themselves, and let the consumer decide what level of service they want
> and get more customers.
>
> But then I am weird that way.
>
> --
> Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com     Bret McDanel
> pgp key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x8AE5C721
>
>
>
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-- 
Thank you,

-Wes-
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