Re: [asterisk-biz] Dear Termination Providers,

I didn't infer that he wants to evaluate based solely on price.  If it were me, I would want that same information in order to simply put the price issue to bed such that I could evaluate other factors with less obfuscation of the total package.  Plus, I regard the easy access to pricing data as a quality issue that reflects on the package and service as a whole.

By the same token, I am always suspicious of vendors that obscure their prices behind a veil of quality claims.


Stephen Davies wrote:

2009/5/1 Peter Beckman <beckman@angryox.com>

Alexander Harrowell wrote:

What's needed is a rate deck that includes every route the provider

supports, US, Canada and everything else.

Hi,

You seem to want to evaluate termination providers on nothing else except price.  I'm not sure why encouraging that simplistic rule is in the interests of termination providers, or your own, for that matter.

What about minor details like quality, CLI support, whether the terminating lines are legitimate or stolen from innocent third parties - don't they matter?

Some unscrupulous scenarios for terminators to use if lots of originators have all these rate decks in their routing engines and are routing solely by price:

1) Publish a low rate to a destination.  "Connect" calls in excess of your capacity (so you can bill them), but connect them to nowhere. Once originators notice apologise profusely for the technical problem but keep the money (the originator won't be able to say exactly which calls failed in this manner).  Fail 10% of calls like this and you can make up what your published low rate is costing you, and the originator probably will accept the CSR that they get.

2) Publish a low rate but run your clock a bit fast to make up the difference.  Remember that you only need to be 0.000001c/min cheapest in order to get lots and lots of minutes because people are selecting automatically by price.  

3) "Forget" to mention various billing wrinkles.  Your excuse is that the csv format doesn't provide for the flag-fall charge, or the call attempt charge if your calls' CSR falls below a threshold, or what have you.  Make sure the info is published somewhere even though you "can't" put them in the csv.

Can others think of more (this is quite fun >:) )

So surely you need to know more about your termination partner than just their price?  And do you really want to tell your termination providers that all you care about is price.  Some cheaply terminated calls already sound pretty terrible.  Do we really want to encourage this race to rock bottom?

Steve

 
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