[VoiceOps] Troubles calling those free conference services

[Alex Balashov]

On 01/27/2011 02:45 PM, Carlos Alvarez wrote:

> I'm sure everyone is aware of the problems with those "free" service
> that profit from arbitrage. We get occasional complaints about not being
> able to dial those, and so far we've explained the scam to them and told
> them we're not going to fix it. However, it happens often enough that
> I'd like to know what others are doing about it.

The right thing to do, in theory, would be to charge your customers 
enough for LD that it doesn't really matter much.  But practically 
speaking, this is often impossible due to the marketing requirements of 
today's competitive environment, e.g. price collapse in wholesale LD, 
"unlimited" long-distance plans touted by ILECs to try to slow down the 
decline of land-line subscribers, etc.

What others do about it, good or bad, that I've seen:

1) Send that traffic to cherry-picked blended routes from their vendors, 
at least until they catch on and get pissed off.

2) Charge 60/60 or even higher on all calls, to at least offset some of 
the damage.  You still take a per-minute loss if you're offering rates 
below what it costs you to call those areas, but if everyone else is 
paying 1 minute minima too for uncontroversial destinations, you may 
make it up.

60/60 isn't really that unusual in retail to begin with, but some offer 
more fractional billing even to retail customers as a selling point.

3) Some smaller IXCs simply refuse to deliver the calls to those areas. 
  If they receive complaints from their subscribers, they quietly allow 
them for a while, under the guise of having resolved a "technical" or 
"service" problem.

4) Enforce a call destination area blend of some proportion (kind of 
like 80/20 RBOC/non-RBOC, but more like, "rural money pit/everything 
else"), even on retail customers.

5) Simply refuse to complete calls and shrug, as you currently do.

-- 
Alex Balashov - Principal
Evariste Systems LLC
260 Peachtree Street NW
Suite 2200
Atlanta, GA 30303
Tel: +1-678-954-0670
Fax: +1-404-961-1892
Web: http://www.evaristesys.com/