[Asterisk-Users] Bill seconds

[Race Vanderdecken]

Your customers are not going to like this.

You have to change the way you bill for calls. 

For $1 your customer gets 60 seconds worth of phone time. However you
have to also charge, like the Bells used to, for setup and teardown
time. Remember the operator used to say " Deposit $1.85 for the first
three minutes" and then it would be 30 cents per minute after that.

Buy a phone card from a competitor and look at the fine print on the
card.

You charge buy seconds they are connected to your system, not for the
time they are actually talking to the remote party.

Example:

To set up the call you charge 10 seconds, and to stop the call you
charge 5 seconds. So the customer only gets 45 seconds of call time. You
get a 15 second cushion. 

Does not seem fair does it. But if they buy an hour 3600 seconds worth
of calls the missing 15 seconds won't be noticed.

You can go further.

Say they buy a 3600 second card. When they call to check their time the
first time on the card you tell them they have 60 minutes, but you
charge them 30 seconds for asking. Set up the code so that every time
they call you have too fields to track call time. The time they think
they have and the time you know they have.

You tell them they have 45 minutes, but the other field knows they only
have 30 minutes. If they ask then your script says "45 minutes left" but
you cut them off when the use 30.

Then you chip away each time the call. 10 seconds for making a call, and
5 seconds when they hang up. This way you are always in credit and can
cut them off without loosing money.

Some card vendors go even further. They sell 3600 seconds, but each time
a call is made they whack a random percentage of the time. 

Worse yet their card system will randomly or systematically hang up on
callers. This will cause the user to redial the call and get hit with
connection charges that vary.

Customers eventually figure out which cards do this type of chicanery
and they stop buying them, but only if there is a competitor for the
route they want to call.
 
Such is the world of unregulated phone calls. Not pretty is it.

Charging time for each call is part of the business. If you don’t want
to charge time to setup and teardown then you have to charge more per
minute. Your customers get all the time the pay for down to the second,
but you are going to have to charge more per minute or you will be in
the boat you are in now.

Race "the tyrant" Vanderdecken

-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Darren
Wiebe
Sent: Thursday, June 16, 2005 1:06 AM
To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Users] Bill seconds

I've done a little thinking on this one....  If you are using ASTCC, it 
would be fairly straightforward to edit it and have it make a 2 second 
adjustment.  If your using another solution it probably would be fairly 
easy also...

Darren Wiebe
darren at aleph-com.net

Americo Sanchez C. wrote:

>
> Hi all,
>
> We've installed Asterisk on a rural development project and we're
> testing a prepaid phone service. As far as now we're having terrific
> service results but there's a problem with the calls billing at our
> local telecom. For instance, a farmer buys a 1 dollar phone card and
use
> it to dial a USA number, the call should lasts for 60 seconds.
Asterisk
> is doing a great job finishing the call exactly at 60 seconds. The
> problem is that the telecom company billing system adds a two second
> delay for each call, so the bill is not for 1 but 2 minutes (they
round
> fractions up).
>
> We're loosing money and the local telecom doesn't seem to have a
> solution for this matter.
>
> Have you experienced something similar? Do you have any idea of how
can
> we solve this? Is it possible to configure Asterisk so that the system
> thinks that a minute has 58 seconds instead of 60?
>
> _________________________________________________________________
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