[VoiceOps] Creating an International Rate Deck

[Dovid Bender]

Shri,

International is a mess. I gave a talk about it at Astricon in 2017 [1].
For instance what one carrier calls mobile another carrier may call
landline. If you are reselling minutes what you really need is a billing
platform such as JeraSoft or A2Billing where you upload all of your
carriers routes and rates so you know what your costs are. You then need to
come up with a routing table based on your carriers routes to give to your
clients. Most billing systems will allow you to set either a set rate for a
destination OR a % based markup. This can be tricky as if your rates one
day go up or down the rates to your clients will change without you telling
them. For this reason we set set static rates and then run reports to make
sure the margins are in an acceptable range. Lastly cheapest isn't always
best. People in the US taking call completion for granted. In general the
cheaper you go the more FAS and other issues you will have.

Regards,

Dovid



[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMmT0lp6nZY

On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 10:10 AM Shripal Daphtary <shripald at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hey group,
>
> I have a question that I have been struggling with for years and have
> never come up with a good solution for.  It revolves around International
> Rate Deck creation, but i guess it could be for any tariff.   We have
> multiple carriers for International, however, i'm trying out Thinq right
> now so we can use their LCR.  Our other carriers aren't very successful
> with Intl.  Thinq's rate deck to me is 6 carriers for each prefix, making
> it around 215,000 lines. The carrier(s) that have the lowest cost for each
> prefix varies, so i can't turn off the most expensive three or something
> like that.
>
> I was thinking of taking the least expensive 3 carriers and then averaging
> them and creating my rate from that average and then only allow Thinq to go
> 3 carriers deep. Does anyone have any experience with this?   Are there any
> best practices?
>
> The second part of the question is how does one calculate the profit
> margin?  Let's say you wanted to make 35% for retail and 20% for wholesale,
> but if you call UK landline, the cost is only 0.004.  Your rate  would be
> 0.0054 for retail and 0.0048, which is nothing.  We have been doing
> something like If your cost is less than 0.03, then increase by 35% or 20%
> or whatever.  however, that doesn't always work if the cost is super close
> to your target.
>
> Does anyone have any hard and fast rules that they use when creating
> decks? is there software that can help my puny brain think through this?
>
>
> Thanks !
>
> Shri
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