[Asterisk-Users] Bill seconds

[David John Walsh]

Another way I have seen this done is to sell units, not pounds and pence credit

eg a £2 calling card has 160 units (ratio of 80 units to the pound).

If you were to charge 8p per min you make that 8 units per min.   This
gives you a 20% increase which might help if your on per second
billing to your upstream carrier.

otherwise you need to make changes to your rating engine  with a "
/60*58 " to re-rate all calls back to a second ( /60) and move the
minuite charge to be a 58 second minuit (*58)

how that is achived needs you to give specific information on which
calling card platform you are using.

You may have a problem in defining  the rates as "per minuite" if they
are not a widely understood minuite legally - it depends on the laws
of your country (in the UK the Trades Descriptions Act would apply and
you'd be hit hard)

David



On 16/06/05, Race Vanderdecken <asteriskusers at codetyrant.com> wrote:
> 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?
> >
> > _________________________________________________________________
> > MSN Amor: busca tu ½ naranja http://latam.msn.com/amor/
> >
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