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@0xdecafbad.com> wrote:
On Fri, 2009-04-24 at 14:35 -0700, John Todd wrote:I dunno, if people are providing a good service at a fair price, then
> 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/
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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