[asterisk-biz] Dear Termination Providers,

SIP sip at arcdiv.com
Fri May 8 12:31:58 CDT 2009 

To some degree, carriers want to protect their pricing structures
because it's an integral part of their competitive business model. It's
a bit the way most retail stores will toss you out on the curb if you
wander in with a notebook and start writing down the prices of their items.

However, the flip side of that argument is that, if you're REALLY able
to compete in the market, you shouldn't be afraid that your prices are
known by any and everyone. Sure, there's the chance that Bob the
mom'n'pop carrier down the road might undercut you for a tenth of a cent
or so on a highly desirable route, but if the ONLY think you're selling
is price, you may as well pack up shop and find another business.
Carrier routes are a commodity market. Price simply cannot be the only
area in which you compete -- in fact, it probably shouldn't be your
number one priority regardless. VoIP never gets bad press because of its
price. It gets bad press because of quality, customer service,
misleading or hidden contractual clauses, difficulty of setup, or any
number of things that you simply can't put in an NDA (and couldn't
enforce secrecy upon, even if you tried).

Signing an NDA doesn't mean really anything about whether or not your
customer is truly interested. Hell... anyone with a pen and 20 seconds
of free time can sign an NDA. The only thing it (nebulously) protects
from is you gathering rates from providers and telling company X down
the road that you can beat their rates because you've seen them
recently, and yours are better. I've signed numerous NDAs in the last
half a decade with companies whose rates and terms were laughable. It
seemed from their terms that they were hardly serious about building a
serious business relationship, so I'm not sure I buy the argument than
an NDA in some way delineates between the serious and the non-serious
businesses.


N.

-- 
Neil Fusillo
CEO
Infinideas, inc.
http://www.ideasip.com




Wes Reece wrote:
> 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 <mailto: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 <http://www.0xdecafbad.com/>    
>     Bret McDanel
>     pgp key:
>     http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x8AE5C721
>     <http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x8AE5C721>
>
>
>
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>
> -- 
> Thank you,
>
> -Wes-
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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