[VoiceOps] Troubles calling those free conference services

[Scott Berkman]

I *THINK* that CommPartners primarily uses Level 3, or at least they used
to.

Level 3's stance last time we checked was that they were NOT going to build
out the level of capacity needed to support these types of services when the
populations and non-free-conference-related traffic levels simply did not
justify it.  I'm with them personally.

I think the only way to ensure bullet-proof completion of these calls would
be to get your own direct trunks to the LECs that host the numbers for these
services.

	-Scott

-----Original Message-----
From: voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org [mailto:voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org]
On Behalf Of Carlos Alvarez
Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2011 3:14 PM
To: voiceops at voiceops.org
Subject: Re: [VoiceOps] Troubles calling those free conference services

Alex Balashov wrote:
> 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.

I was unclear.  It's not that we block them, it's that the calls quite often
fail to complete through all our carriers.  We call that carrier and they
give us the usual "limited IXC capacity" line for the number. 
Most of these things are hosted in small towns where the arbitrage is
profitable, so they built the capacity without the idea that they'd have
thousands of conference calls coming in.

I'd consider taking a hit on the cost if it stopped people calling us, but
first I'd have to find the carrier(s) that can actually get the calls there
to start with.

We educate the customers who call, and most often simply reminding them that
they get a free conference service with us is all they need.  We obviously
need to do a better job letting them know that it's included.

So anyway the problem isn't the calls themselves, but us having to waste
time fielding support calls.

BTW, the carrier that we most often send those calls to and fail most often
is Commpartners, if anyone cares.

--
Carlos Alvarez
TelEvolve
602-889-3003


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